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автор Sir Henry John Newbolt

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“Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and cursed us.”

SUBMARINE
AND
ANTI-SUBMARINE

BY
HENRY NEWBOLT

AUTHOR OF ‘THE BOOK OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR,’ ‘TALES OF THE GREAT WAR,’ ETC.

WITH A COLOURED FRONTISPIECE AND 20 FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY NORMAN WILKINSON, R.I.

NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919

TO
JOHN BUCHAN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 

PAGE

I.

The Spirit of Submarine War 1

II.

The Evolution of the Submarine 10

III.

The Submarine of To-day 36

IV.

A British Submarine Base 52

V.

Submarines and War Policy 68

VI.

Submarine v. War-ship 78

VII.

War-ship v. Submarine 95

VIII.

British Submarines in the Baltic 108

IX.

British Submarines in the Dardanelles 125

X.

The U-Boat Blockade 161

XI.

Trawlers, Smacks, and Drifters 178

XII.

The Destroyers 201

XIII.

P-Boats and Auxiliary Patrol 216

XIV.

Q-Boats 231

XV.

Submarine v. Submarine 256

XVI.

The Hunted 272

XVII.

Zeebrugge and Ostend 295

ILLUSTRATIONS

 

PAGE

‘Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and cursed us’ (

Coloured

)

Frontispiece

‘Does not look like any ship you have ever seen’

47

‘Towed back by an enemy trawler’

59

‘She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her’

63

‘Turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats’

75

‘Were brought in by the 50-ton smack

Provident

of Brixham’

83

‘She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him’

99

‘The Russian ice-breakers freed them from the harbour ice’

121

‘The Fort gave them 200 rounds at short range’

129

‘Made her fast alongside his conning-tower’

135

‘She was mortally hit’

149

‘

I’ll Try’s

shell struck the base of the conning-tower’

185

‘The U-boat started with an enormous advantage of gun power’

199

‘U.C.-boats stealing in across the black and silver water’

211

‘The diver who first went down found the submarine lying on her side’

229

‘A fourth boat was partially lowered with a proper amount of confusion’

241

‘The U-boat never recovered from the surprise’

245

‘Was steering about in figures of 8, with his gun still manned’

265

‘A huge column of water which fell plump on the Commander’

287

‘The submarine suddenly broke surface’

291

‘A tremendous explosion was seen at the shore end of the Mole’

305

SUBMARINE AND ANTI-SUBMARINE

CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF SUBMARINE WAR

It is probable that a good deal of the information contained in this book will be new to the public; for it has been collected under favour of exceptional circumstances. But the reader will gain little if he cannot contribute something on his side—if he cannot share with the writer certain fundamental beliefs. The first of these is that every nation has a spirit of its own—a spirit which is the mainspring of national action. It is more than a mechanical spring; for it not only supplies a motive force, but determines the moral character of the action which results. When we read the history of nations, and especially the history of their explorations, wars, and revolutions, we soon recognise the spirit of each, and learn to expect its appearance in every moment of crisis or endurance. If it duly appears, our impression is confirmed; if it fails on any occasion, we are disappointed. But the disappointments are few—nations may at times surprise us; but, as a rule, they are like themselves. Even when they develop and seem to change, they are apt, under the stress of action, to return to their aboriginal character, and to exhibit it in their old historic fashion. To attempt, then, to give an account of any national struggle, without paying attention to the influence of the characteristic spirit of the country or countries concerned, would be a difficult undertaking, and a mistaken one. Even in a short crisis, a great people will probably display its historic colours, and in a long one it certainly will. To ignore this, to describe national actions without giving a sense of the animating spirit, would be not only a tame and inadequate method; it would lower the value of life itself by making mere prose of what should, by right, partake of the nature of poetry. History cannot often be entirely poetical, or poetry entirely historical. When Homer told the tale of Troy, he did not make prose—or even history—of it. He everywhere infused into it ‘an incomparable ardour’—he made an epic. But Mr. Thomas Hardy wrote history in ‘The Dynasts,’ and made it an epic too. An epic—the common definition tells us—is ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style.’ ‘The Dynasts’ certainly is that—the struggle is great, the issues are great, the men are great. Even more than their heroic fighting, their speech and manners in the moment of action are such as to show unfailingly by what a distinctive and ever-present spirit national life may be sustained and magnified.

When we come to nearer times, and more familiar events, the same necessity is upon us. What writer of artistic sense, or scientific honesty, would touch, for example, the history of modern Egypt without attempting to understand the character of such men as Gordon and Cromer, and the spirit which (however personal and diverse in its manifestations) they both drew from the nation that sent them forth? Such an understanding would enable the narrator to carry us all with him. For every man of our national birth and breeding would feel, when he was told the story of such heroes, not only their superiority but their likeness to himself. ‘There,’ he would say, ‘but for lack of fortune, or opportunity, or courage, or stature, there goes John Smith.’ It is admiration which helps us to feel that, and a mean spirit which conceals it from us.

Further, it is my belief that the historian who would deal adequately with our present War must have an even wider understanding and sympathy. He must have a broad enough view to recognise all the various motives which impelled us, section by section, to enter the struggle; and a deep enough insight to perceive that, below all motives which can be expressed or debated in words, there was an instinct—a spontaneous emotion—which irresistibly stirred the majority of our people, and made us a practically unanimous nation. He must be able to see that this unanimity was no freak—no sudden outburst—but the natural fulfilment of a strong and long-trained national character; and he must trace, with grateful admiration, the national service contributed by many diverse classes, and by a large number of distinguished men—the leaders and patterns of the rest. However scientific the historian’s judgments, and however restrained his style, it must be impossible for any reader to miss the real point of the narrative—the greatness of the free nations, and the nobility of their heroes. Belgians, Serbians, French, Italians, Americans—all must hear their great men honoured, and their corporate virtues generously recognised. We Britons, for our own part, must feel, at every mention of the names of our champions, the fine sting of the invisible fire with which true glory burns the heart. It must never be possible to read, without an uplifting of the spirit, the achievements of commanders like Smith-Dorrien, Haig, and Birdwood—Plumer and Rawlinson, Allenby and Byng, and Horne; or the fate of Cradock and Kitchener; or the sea-fights of Beatty and Sturdee, of Keyes and Tyrwhitt. It must be clear, from the beginning to the end of the vast record, that the British blood has equalled and surpassed its ancient fame—that in every rank the old virtues of courage, coolness, and endurance, of ordered energy and human kindliness, have been, not the occasional distinction, but the common characteristics of our men. Look where you will on the scene of war, you must be shown ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style’—fit, at least, to indicate the greatness of the national spirit.

In this book our concern is with the war at sea, and with a part only of that gigantic effort. But of this part, every word that has been said holds good. The submarine and anti-submarine campaign is not a series of minor operations. Its history is not a mere episode among chapters of greater significance. On the contrary, the fate of Britain, and the fate of Germany, were speedily seen to be staked upon the issue of this particular contest, as they have been staked upon no other part of the world-wide struggle. The entrance of America into the fellowship of nations was involved in it. The future of civilisation depends upon it. Moreover, in its course the British seaman has shown himself possessed, in the highest degree, of the qualities by which his forefathers conquered and kept our naval predominance; and finally, it is in the submarine war that we see most sharply the contrast of the spirit of chivalry with the spirit of savagery; of the law of humanity with the lawlessness of brute force; of the possible redemption of social life with its irretrievable degradation. It is a subject worthy, thrice over, of treatment in a national epic.

The present book is not an epic—it is not a poetical work at all. Half of it is mere technical detail; and the rest plain fact plainly told. But it is far from my intention that the sense of admiration for national heroes, or the recognition of national greatness, shall be absent from it. I have used few epithets; for they seemed to me needless and inadequate. The stories of the voyages and adventures of our own submarines, and of the fighting of our men against the pirates, need no heightening. They need only to be read and understood; and it is chiefly with a view to their better understanding, that the reader is offered a certain amount of comment and description in the earlier chapters. But a suggestion or two may be made here, at the very beginning, in the hope of starting a train of thought which may accompany the narrative with a whisper of historic continuity—a reminder that as with men, so with nations—none becomes utterly base on a sudden, or utterly heroic. Their vices and their virtues are the harvesting of their past.

Let us take a single virtue, like courage, which is common to all nations but shows under a different form or colour in each, and so becomes a national characteristic, plainly visible in action. A historical study of British courage would, I believe, show two facts: first, that the peculiar quality of it has persisted for centuries; and, secondly, that if our people have changed at all in this respect, they have only changed in the direction of greater uniformity. Once they had two kinds of courage in war; now they have but one, and that by far the better one. In the old days, among the cool and determined captains of our race, there were always a certain number of hot heads—‘men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science.’ The best of them, like Sir Richard Grenville, had the luck to die conspicuously, in their great moments, and so to leave us an example of the spirit that defies odds, and sets men above the fear of death. The rest led their men into mad adventures, where they perished to the injury of their cause. Most Englishmen can understand the pure joy of onset, the freedom of the moment when everything has been given for the hope of winning one objective; but it has been the more characteristic way of our people—at any rate for the last five centuries—to double courage with coolness, and fight not only their hardest but their best. From Cressy to Waterloo, and from Mons to Arras, we have won many battles by standing steadily and shooting the attack to pieces. Charges our men have made, but under discipline and in the nick of opportunity. The Black Prince charged fiercely at Poitiers; but it was only when he had broken three attacks, and saw his chance to win. The charge of the Worcesters at Gheluvelt, the charge of the Oxfords at Nonneboschen, and a hundred more like them, were as desperate as any ‘ride of death’; but they were neither reckless nor useless, they were simply the heroic move to win the game. Still more is this the rule at sea. Beatty at Jutland, like Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar, played an opening in which he personally risked annihilation; but nothing was ever done with greater coolness, or more admirable science. The perfect picture of all courage is, perhaps, a great British war-ship in action; for there you have, among a thousand men, one spirit of elation, of fearlessness, of determination, backed by trained skill and a self-forgetful desire to apply it in the critical moment. The submarine, and the anti-submarine ship, trawler or patrol-boat are, on a smaller scale, equally perfect examples; for there is no hour of their cruise when they are not within call of the critical moment. In the trenches, in the air, in the fleet, you will see the same steady skilful British courage almost universally exemplified. But in the submarine war, the discipline needed is even more absolute, the skill even more delicate, the ardour even more continuous and self-forgetful; and all these demands are even more completely fulfilled.

This is fortunate, and doubly fortunate; for the submarine war has proved to be the main battlefield of our spiritual crusade, as well as a vital military campaign. The men engaged in it have been marked out by fate, as our champions in the contest of ideals. They are the patterns and defenders of human nature in war, against those who preach and practise barbarism. Here—and nowhere else so clearly as here—the world has seen the death struggle between the two spirits now contending for the future of mankind. Between the old chivalry, and the new savagery, there can be no more truce; one of the two must go under, and the barbarians knew it when they cried Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Of the spirit of the German nation it is not necessary to say much. Everything that could be charged against them has been already proved, by their own words and actions. They have sunk without warning women and children, doctors and nurses, neutrals and wounded men, not by tens or hundreds but by thousands. They have publicly rejoiced over these murders with medals and flags, with songs and school holidays. They have not only broken the rules of international law; they have with unparalleled cruelty, after sinking even neutral ships, shot and drowned the crews in open boats, that they might leave no trace of their crimes. The men who have done—and are still doing—these things have courage of a kind. They face danger and hardship to a certain point, though, by their own account, in the last extreme they fail to show the dignity and sanity with which our own men meet death. But their peculiar defect is not one of nerve, but of spirit. They lack that instinct which, with all civilised races, intervenes, even in the most violent moment of conflict or desperation, and reminds the combatant that there are blows which it is not lawful to strike in any circumstances whatever. This instinct—the religion of all chivalrous peoples—is connected by some with humanity, by some with courtesy, by ourselves with sport. In this matter we are all in the right. The savage in conflict thinks of nothing but his own violent will; the civilised and the chivalrous are always conscious of the fact that there are other rights in the world beside their own. The humane man forbears his enemy; the courteous man respects him, as one with rights like his own; the man with the instinct of sport knows that he must not snatch success by destroying the very game itself. The civilised nation will not hack its way to victory through the ruins of human life. It will be restrained, if by no other consideration, yet at least by the recollection that it is but one member of a human fellowship, and that the greatness of a part can never be achieved by the corruption of the whole.

The German nature is not only devoid of this instinct, it is roused to fury by the thought of it. Any act, however cruel and barbarous, if only it tends to defeat the enemies of Germany, is a good deed, a brave act, and to be commended. The German general who lays this down is supported by the German professor who adds: ‘The spontaneous and elementary hatred towards England is rooted in the deepest depths of our own being—there, where considerations of reason do not count, where the irrational, the instinct, alone dominates. We hate in the English the hostile principle of our innermost and highest nature. And it is well that we are fully aware of this, because we touch therein the vital meaning of this War.’ Before the end comes, the barbarian will find this hostile principle, and will hate it, in the French, the Italians, the Americans—in the whole fellowship of nations against which he is fighting with savage fury. But, to our satisfaction, he has singled us out first; for, when we hear him, we too are conscious of a spontaneous hatred in the depths of our being; and we see that in this we do ‘touch the vital meaning of this War.’

CHAPTER II
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBMARINE

Many are the fables which the Germans have done their best to pass off for truth among the spectators of the present War; but not one is more wilfully and demonstrably false, than their account of the origin of the submarine. According to the story which they have endeavoured to spread among the unthinking public in neutral countries, the under-sea boat—the arm with which they claim to have revolutionised naval warfare—is the product of German ingenuity and skill. The French, they say, had merely played with the idea; their submarines were costly toys, dangerous only to those who tried to navigate them. The Americans had shown some promise half a century ago; but having since become a pacifist race of dollar-hunters, they had lost interest in war, and their boats would be found useless in practice. As for the British, the day of their naval power was past; they had spent their time and money upon the mania for big ships, and neglected the more scientific vessel, the submarine, which had made the big ships obsolete in a single year’s campaign. The ship of the future, the U-boat, was the national weapon of Germany alone.

The claim was unjustified; but, so far, it was not—to an uninstructed neutral—obviously unjustified. The Americans were not yet at war; the submarines of France and Britain were hardly ever heard of. Our boats had few targets, and their operations were still further restricted by the rules of international law, which we continued to keep, though our enemies did not. Moreover, whatever our Service did achieve was done secretly; and even our successes were announced so briefly and vaguely as to make no impression. The result was that the Germans were able to make out a plausible title to the ‘command of the sea beneath the surface’; and they even gained a hearing for the other half of their claim, which was unsupported by any evidence whatever. The submarine is not, in its origin, of German invention; the idea of submarine war was not a German idea, nor have Germans contributed anything of value to the long process of experiment and development by which the idea has been made to issue in practical under-water navigation. From beginning to end, the Germans have played their characteristic part. They have been behind their rivals in intelligence; they have relied on imitation of the work of others; on discoveries methodically borrowed and adapted; and when they have had to trust to their own abilities, they have never passed beyond mediocrity. They have shown originality in one direction only—their ruthless disregard of law and humanity. These statements are not the outcome of partisanship, but of a frank study of the facts. They are clearly proved by the history of submarine war.

That history may be said to begin with the second half of the sixteenth century, when the two main principles or aims of submarine war were first set forth—both by English seamen. Happily the records remain. Sir William Monson, one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, in his famous ‘Naval Tracts,’ suggests that a powerful ship may be sunk much more easily by an under-water shot than by ordinary gunfire. His plan is ‘to place a cannon in the hold of a bark, with her mouth to the side of the ship: the bark shall board, and then to give fire to the cannon that is stowed under water, and they shall both instantly sink: the man that shall execute this stratagem may escape in a small boat hauled the other side of the bark.’

This is the germinal idea from which sprang the submarine mine or torpedo; and the first design for a submarine boat was also produced by the English Navy in the same generation. The author of this was William Bourne, who had served as a gunner under Sir William Monson. His invention is described in his book of ‘Inventions or Devices’ published in 1578, and is remarkable for its proposed method of solving the problem of submersion. This is to be achieved by means of two side-tanks, into which water can be admitted through perforations, and from which it can be blown out again by forcing the inner side of each tank outwards. These false sides are made tight with leather suckers, and moved by winding hand-screws—a crude and inefficient mechanism, but a proof that the problem had been correctly grasped. For a really practical solution of this, and the many other difficulties involved in submarine navigation, the resources of applied science were then hopelessly inadequate. It was not until after more than three hundred years of experiment that inventors were in a position to command a mechanism that would carry out their ideas effectively.

The record of these three centuries of experiment is full of interest; for it shows us a long succession of courageous men taking up, one after another, the same group of scientific problems and bringing them, in spite of all dangers and disasters, gradually nearer to a final solution. Many nations contributed to the work, but especially the British, the American, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Russian, and the Italian. The part played by each of them has been, on the whole, characteristic. The British were the first, as practical seamen, to put forward the original idea, gained from the experience of their rivalry with Spain. They have also succeeded, at the end of the experimental period, in making the best combined use of the results of the long collaboration. A Dutchman built the first practical submarine, and achieved the first successful dive. The Americans have made the greatest number of inventions, and of daring experiments in earlier wars. The French have shown, as a nation, the strongest interest in the idea, and their navy was effectively armed with submarines ten years before that of any other Power. To them, to the Dutch, and to the Italians, the credit belongs of that indispensable invention, the optic tube or periscope. The Swedes and Russians have the great names of Nordenfelt and Drzewiecki to their credit. The Germans alone, among the eight or nine nations interested in the science of naval war, have from first to last contributed almost nothing to the evolution of the submarine. The roll of submarine inventors includes about 175 names, of which no less than 60 belong to the English-speaking peoples, but only six to Germany. Among these six, the name of Bauer is remembered as that of a courageous experimenter, persevering through a career of repeated failures; but neither he, nor any of his fellow countrymen, advanced the common cause by the suggestion of a single idea of value. Finally, when the German Admiralty, after the failure of their own Howaldt boat, decided to borrow the Holland type from America, it was no German, but the Franco-Spanish engineer d’Equevilley, who designed for them the first five U-boats, of which all the later ones are modifications. The English Admiralty were in no such straits. They were only one year before the Germans in adopting the Holland type; but the native genius at their disposal has enabled them to keep ahead of their rivals from that day to this, in the design, efficiency, size, and number of their submarine vessels. And this result is exactly what might have been expected from the history of submarine invention.

The construction of a workable submarine depends upon the discovery and solution of a number of problems, the first five of which may be said to be the problems of—

1. Submersion.
2. Stability.
3. Habitability.
4. Propulsion and Speed.
5. Offensive Action.

If we take these in order, and trace the steps by which the final solution was approached, we shall be able to confirm what has been said about the work contributed by successive inventors.

1. Submersion.—We have seen that for submersion and return to the surface, Bourne had at the very beginning devised the side-tank to which water could be admitted, and from which it could be ‘blown out’ at will. Bushnell, a remarkable inventor of British-American birth, substituted a hand-pump in his boat of 1771, for the mechanism proposed by Bourne. In 1795, Armand-Maizière, a Frenchman, designed a steam submarine vessel to be worked by ‘a number of oars vibrating on the principle of a bird’s wing.’ Of these ‘wings,’ one lot were intended to make the boat submerge. Nothing came of this proposal, and for more than a century tanks and pumps remained the sole means of submersion. In 1893 Haydon, an American, invented a submarine for the peaceful purpose of exploring the ocean bed. Its most important feature was the method of submersion. This was accomplished by means of an interior cylindrical tank, with direct access to the sea, and fitted with two powerfully geared pistons. By simply drawing the pistons in, or pushing them out, the amount of water ballast could be nicely regulated, and the necessity for compressed air or other expellants was avoided. This device would have given great satisfaction to William Bourne, the Elizabethan gunner, whose original idea, after more than two centuries, it carried out successfully. Finally, in 1900, the American inventor, Simon Lake, in his Argonaut II., introduced a new method of diving. For the reduction of the vessel’s floatability he employed the usual tanks; but for ‘travelling’ between the surface and the bottom, he made use of ‘four big hydroplanes, two on each side, that steer the boat either down or up.’ Similar hydroplanes, or horizontal rudders, appeared in the later Holland boats, and are now in common use in all submarine types.

Lake was of British descent, his family having emigrated from Wales to New Jersey; but he owed his first interest in submarine construction, and many of his inventive ideas, to the brilliant French writer, Jules Verne, whose book ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea’ came by chance into his hands when he was a boy ten years old, and made a lasting impression upon him.

2. Stability.—Next to the power of submersion, the most necessary quality in a submarine is that of stability under water. The most obvious method of securing this is by water ballast, which was probably the first means actually employed. Bushnell, in 1771, substituted a heavy weight of lead, as being more economical of space and better suited to the shape of his boat, which resembled a turtle in an upright position. The leaden ballast, being detachable at will, also acted as a safety weight, to be dropped at a moment of extreme urgency. In the Nautilus, built in 1800 by the famous engineer, Robert Fulton, an American of English birth and education, the leaden weight reappeared as a keel, and was entirely effective. The inventor, in a trial at Brest in 1801, dived to a depth of 25 feet, and performed successful evolutions in different directions for over an hour. Bauer, fifty years later, returned to the ballast principle, and used both a water-tank and a safety weight in the same boat. The results were disastrous. His first submarine sank at her first trial in Kiel harbour, and was never refloated. His second was built in England; but this, too, sank, with great loss of life. His third, Le Diable Marin, after several favourable trials at Cronstadt, fouled her propeller in a bed of seaweed, and the releasing of the safety weights only resulted in bringing her bows to the surface. The crew escaped with difficulty, and the vessel then sank.

Three years later, in 1861, Olivier Riou designed two boats, in both of which stability was to be preserved automatically by the device of a double hull. The two cylinders which composed it, one within the other, were not fixed immovably to one another, but were on rollers, so that if the outer hull rolled to the right the inner rolled to the left. By this counterbalancing effect, it was estimated that the stability of the vessel would be absolutely secured; but nothing is recorded of the trials of these boats. The celebrated French inventors, Bourgois and Brun, reintroduced the principle of water-tanks combined with a heavy iron ballast keel. But in 1881, the Rev. W. Garrett, the English designer of the Nordenfelt boats, invented a new automatic mechanism for ensuring stability. This consisted of two vertical rudders with a heavy pendulum weight so attached to them that, if the boat dipped out of the horizontal, the pendulum swung down and gave the rudders an opposite slant which raised the vessel again to a horizontal position. This arrangement, though perfect in theory, in practice developed fatal defects, and subsequent types have all returned to the use of water-tanks, made to compensate, by elaborate but trustworthy mechanism, for every loss or addition of weight.

3. Habitability.—For the habitability of a submarine the prime necessity is a supply of air capable of supporting life during the period of submersion. The first actual constructor of a submarine, Cornelius van Drebbel, of Alkmaar, in Holland, was fully aware of this problem, and claimed to have solved it, not by mechanical but by chemical means. His improved boat, built in England about 1622, carried twelve rowers, besides passengers, among whom King James I. is said to have been included on one occasion, and was successfully navigated for several hours at a depth of ten to fifteen feet. ‘Drebbel conceived,’ says Robert Boyle, in 1662, ‘that ’tis not the whole body of the air, but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part of it that makes it fit for respiration, which being spent, the grosser body or carcase (if I may so call it) of the Air, is unable to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart: so that (for aught I could gather) besides the Mechanical contrivance of his vessel he had a Chymical liquor, which he accounted the chief secret of his Submarine Navigation. For when from time to time, he perceived that the finer and purer part of the Air was consumed or over-clogged by the respiration and steames of those that went in his ship, he would, by unstopping a vessel full of the liquor, speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vital parts as would make it again for a good while fit for Respiration.’

Drebbel, who was a really scientific man, may possibly have discovered this chemical secret. If so, he anticipated by more than 200 years a very important device now in use in all submarines, and in any case he was the originator of the idea. But his son-in-law, a German named Kuffler, who attempted after Drebbel’s death to exploit his submarine inventions, was a man of inferior ability, and either ignorant of the secret or incapable of utilising it. For another century and a half, submarine designers contented themselves with the small supply of air which was carried down at the time of submersion. Even the Turtle—Bushnell’s boat of 1776, which has been described as ‘the first submarine craft which really navigated under serious conditions’—was only built to hold one man with a sufficient supply of air for half an hour’s submersion. This was a bare minimum of habitability, and Fulton, twenty-five years later, found it necessary to equip his Nautilus with a compressed air apparatus. Even with this, the crew of two could only be supplied for one hour. In 1827, the very able French designer, Castera, took out a patent for a submarine life-boat, to which air was to be supplied by a tube from the surface, protected by a float, from which the whole vessel was suspended. The danger here was from the possible entry of water through the funnel, and the boat, though planned with great ingenuity, was never actually tried. Bauer, in 1855, fitted his Diable Marin with large water-tubes, running for thirty feet along the top of the boat and pierced with small holes from which, when desired, a continual rain could be made to fall. This shower-bath had a purifying effect on the vitiated air, but it had obvious disadvantages; and there is no record of its having been put into actual use before the unfortunate vessel sank, as before related. In the same year, a better principle was introduced by Babbage, an English inventor, who designed a naval diving-bell, fitted with three cylinders of compressed air. His method was followed by Bourgois and Brun, whose boats of 1863–5 carried steel reservoirs with compressed air, at a pressure of at least 15 atmospheres. The principle was now established, and was adopted in Holland and Lake boats, and in all subsequent types, with the addition of chemical treatment of the vitiated air.

4. Propulsion.—The various solutions of this problem have naturally followed the successive steps in the development of machinery. Drebbel made use of oars. Bushnell, though he speaks of ‘an oar,’ goes on to describe it as ‘formed upon the principle of the screw—its axis entered the vessel, and being turned one way rowed the vessel forward, but being turned the other way rowed it backward: it was made to be turned by the hand or foot.’ Moreover, he had a similar ‘oar’ placed at the top of the vessel, which helped it to ascend or descend in the water. The conclusion seems unavoidable that to this designer belongs the honour of having invented the screw propeller, and also of having put it into successful operation. Fulton adopted the same method of propeller and hand-winch in his Nautilus; but his huge vessel, the Mute, built in 1814 to carry 100 men, was driven by a silent steam-engine. He died during the trials of this boat, and further experiment with it seems to have been abandoned, possibly owing to the great interest excited by his first war steamer, which was building at the same time. A regrettable set-back was thus caused. For forty years no one experimented with any kind of propulsory engine. Bauer, in 1855, could devise no better method of working his propeller than a system of 7-foot wheels, turned by a pair of men running on a treadmill. At the same moment, however, a more fruitful genius was at work. A French professor, Marié-Davy, designed a submarine in which the propeller was driven by an electro-magnetic engine placed in the stern of the ship, with batteries forward. The idea was a valuable one, with a great future before it, though for the moment it achieved no visible success. A year later, in 1855, the famous British engineer, James Nasmyth, designed a ‘submerged mortar,’ which was in reality a ram of great weight and thickness, capable of being submerged level with the surface, and driven at a speed of over 10 knots by a steam-engine with a single high-pressure boiler. But in spite of the simplicity and power of this boat, it was finally rejected as being neither invisible nor invulnerable to an armed enemy; and in their desire to obtain complete submersion, the French inventors of the next few years—Hubault, Conseil, and Masson—all returned to the hand-winch method of propulsion. Riou, however, in 1861, adopted steam for one of his boats, and electric power for the other; and in 1883 the American engineer, Alstitt, built the first submarine fitted with both steam and electricity. Steam was also used in the Plongeur of Bourgois and Brun, which was completed in the same year.

The American Civil War then gave a great opportunity for practical experiments in torpedo attack; but the difficulty of wholly submerged navigation not having been yet solved, the boats used were not true submarines, but submersibles. Their propulsion was by steam, and their dimensions small. A more ambitious invention was put forward in 1869 by a German, Otto Vogel, whose design was accepted by the Prussian Government. His submersible steamship was to be heavily armed, and was ‘considered the equal of a first-class iron-clad in defensive and offensive powers.’ These powers, however, never came into operation.

Inventors now returned to the designing of true submarines; and after the Frenchman, Constantin, the American, Halstead, and the Russian, Drzewiecki, had all made the best use they could of the hand-winch or the pedal for propulsion, three very interesting attempts were made in 1877–8 to secure a more satisfactory engine. Olivier’s boat, patented in May 1877–8, was to be propelled by the gases generated from the ignition of high explosives, the massed vapours escaping through a tube at the stern. This ingenious method was, however, too dangerous for practical use. Surman’s design of 1878 included a propeller, rotated by compressed air. But the English boat of the same date, Garrett’s Resurgam, was much the most noteworthy of the three, and introduced a method which may in the future be brought to perfection with great results. In this boat, the motive force was steam, and propulsion under water, as well as on the surface, was aimed at and actually attained. In her trials, the vessel showed herself capable of navigating under water for a distance of 12 miles, by getting up a full head of steam in a very powerful boiler, with the aid of a blower, before diving; then by shutting the fire-door and chimney, and utilising the latent heat as long as it would last. When the heat was exhausted, it was, of course, necessary to return to the surface, slow up the fire again and recharge the boiler with water. The vessel was remarkably successful, and had the great merit of showing no track whatever when moving under water. She was lost by an accident, but not until she had impressed Nordenfelt, the Swedish inventor, so strongly that he secured the services of her designer, Garrett, for the building of his own submarine boats. The first of these appeared in 1881.

In the same year were patented Woodhouse’s submarine, driven by compressed air, and Génoud’s, with a gas-engine worked by hydrogen, which is said to have attained a speed of between four and five knots. Blakesley, in 1884, proposed to use steam raised in a fireless boiler heated by a chemical composition. In 1884, too, Drzewiecki produced the fourth of his ingenious little boats, driven this time not by pedals but by an electric motor. His example was followed by Tuck of San Francisco shortly afterwards, and by Campbell and Ash in their Nautilus, which in 1886 underwent very successful trials in the West Indian Docks at Tilbury, near London. In 1886 D’Allest, the celebrated French engineer, designed a submarine fitted with a petrol combustion engine. But the question of propulsion may be said to have been finally settled, within a few months after this, in favour of the electro-motor. For Gustave Zédé’s famous Gymnote, which was actually put on the stocks in April 1887, attained in practice a surface speed of 10 knots, and a maximum of 7 to 8 under water. This success saved future designers the trouble of further experiments with ingenious futilities.

5. Offensive Action.—We have so far been considering the development of the submarine as a vessel navigable under water, without reference to the purpose of offence in war. But this purpose was from the first in view; and with almost all the inventors recorded, it formed the main incentive of their efforts. The evolution of the submarine weapon has been much simpler, and more regular, than that of the vessel which was to use it; but it has been equally wonderful, and the history of it is equally instructive. Briefly, the French, in this department as in the other, have shown the most imaginative enthusiasm, the Americans the greatest determination to achieve results—even with crude or dangerous means—while the English have to their credit both the earliest attempts in actual war, and the final achievement of the automobile torpedo. Of the Germans, as before, we must record that they have contributed nothing of any scientific value.

Sir William Monson’s device of a bark, with an under-water cannon and an accompanying boat was soon developed by the English navy into the more practicable mine, self-contained and floating, to be towed by boat or submarine. In January, 1626, the King gave a warrant to the Master of the Ordnance, ‘for the making of divers water-mines, water-petards, and boates to goe under water.’ In June of the same year, the Duke of Buckingham, then commanding the naval expedition for the relief of La Rochelle, issued a warrant ‘for the delivery of 50 water-mynes, 290 water-petards, and 2 boates to conduct them under water.’ Pepys in his ‘Diary’ for March 14, 1662, mentions a proposal by Kuffler of an ‘engine to blow up ships.’ He adds, ‘We doubted not the matter of fact, it being tried in Cromwell’s time, but the safety of carrying them in ships;’ and probably this distrust of Drebbel’s German subordinate proved to be justified, for nothing more is heard of the design. The attempt referred to as made ‘in Cromwell’s time’ may have been Prince Rupert’s attack on Blake’s flagship, the Leopard, in 1650. The engine then used was not a submarine one but an infernal machine, concealed in an oil-barrel, brought alongside in a shore boat by men disguised as Portuguese, and intended to be hoisted on board the ship and then fired by a trigger and string. A more ingenious ‘ship-destroying engine’ was devised by the Marquess of Worcester in 1655. This was evidently a clock-machine, for it might be affixed to a ship either inside, by stealth, or outside by a diver, ‘and at an appointed minute, though a week after, either day or night, it shall infallibly sink that ship.’

The clock machine was actually first tried in action in 1776 by Bushnell, or rather by Sergeant Lee, whom he employed to work his Turtle for him. The attack by this submarine upon the Eagle, a British 64-gun ship lying in the Hudson River, was very nearly successful. The Turtle reached the enemy’s stern unobserved, carrying a mine or magazine of 150 lbs. of powder, and provided with a detachable wood-screw which was to be turned until it bit firmly on the ship’s side. The mine was then to be attached to it, and the clockwork set going. The wood-screw, however, bit upon some iron fittings instead of wood, and failed to hold; the tide also was too strong for Lee, who had to work the wood-screw and the propeller at the same time. He came to the surface, was chased by a guard-boat, and dived again, abandoning his torpedo, which drifted and blew up harmlessly when the clockwork ran down. Lee escaped, but the Turtle was soon afterwards caught and sunk by the British. Bushnell himself, in the following year, attacked the Cerberus with a ‘machine’ consisting of a trigger-mine towed by a whale-boat. He was detected, and his mine captured by a British schooner, the crew of which, after hauling the machine on deck, accidentally exploded it themselves, three out of the four of them being killed.

In 1802 Fulton’s Nautilus, in her trials at Brest, succeeded in blowing up a large boat in the harbour. In 1814 his submersible, the Mute, was armed with ‘columbiads,’ or immensely strong under-water guns, which had previously been tried with success on an old hulk. Similar guns were tried nearly fifty years later by the Spanish submarine designer Monturiol. But the offensive weapon of the period was the mine, and the ingenuity of inventors was chiefly directed to methods of affixing it to the side or bottom of the ship to be destroyed. One of these was the use of long gloves of leather or rubber, protruding from the interior of the submarine, invented by Castera in 1827, and adopted by Bauer, Drzewiecki, and Garrett in succession. But the device was both unhandy and dangerous; there would often be great difficulty in manœuvring the boat into a position in which the gloves would be available, and they could not be made thick enough to withstand the pressure of any depth of water. Practical military instinct demanded a method of launching the mine or torpedo against the target, and the first attempts were made by placing a trigger-mine at the end of a spar carried by the nose of the attacking boat. In October, 1863, during the American Civil War, the forts of Charleston were in danger from the accurate fire of the Federal battleship Ironsides, and Lieut. Glassell was ordered to attack her in the submarine David. He had no difficulty in getting near his enemy and exploding his torpedo, but he had misjudged his distance, and only succeeded in deluging the Ironsides with a column of water. The submarine was herself severely injured by the explosion and had to be abandoned. A second David, commanded by Lieut. Dixon, in February, 1864, attacked the Housatonic, off the same harbour, and in spite of the greatest vigilance on the part of Admiral Dahlgren’s officers, succeeded in reaching the side of the battleship, where she lay for the space of a minute making sure of her contact. The mine was then fired: the Housatonic rose on a great wave, listed heavily, and sank at once. The David, too, disappeared, and it was found three years afterwards that she had been irresistibly sucked into the hole made in her enemy’s side. After this, experiments were made with drifting and towing mines, and with buoyant mines to be released at a depth below the enemy’s keel; but by 1868 the invention of the automobile torpedo by the English engineer, Whitehead, of Fiume, solved the problem of the submarine offensive in the most sudden and conclusive manner.

The Torpedo.—Whitehead’s success arose out of the failure of an enterprising Austrian officer, Captain Lupuis, who had been trying to steer a small fireship along the surface of the water by means of ropes from a fixed base either on shore or in a parent ship. The plan was a crude one and was rejected by the Austrian naval authorities; it was then entrusted to Whitehead, who found it incapable of any practical realisation. He was, however, impressed with Lupuis’ belief in the value of a weapon which could be operated from a distance, and though he failed in designing a controllable vessel, he conceived the idea of an automobile torpedo, and, after two years’ work, constructed it in a practical form. It has been spoken of as ‘the only invention that was perfect when devised,’ and it certainly came very near perfection at the first attempt, but it was erratic and could not be made to keep its depth. In 1868, however, Whitehead invented the ‘balance-chamber,’ which remedied these defects, and brought two finished torpedoes to England for trial. They were fired by compressed air from a submerged tube, and at once proved capable of averaging 7½ to 8½ knots up to 600 yards and of striking a ship under way up to 200 yards. The target, an old corvette in the Medway, was sunk on to the mud by the first shot, at 136 yards, and immediately after the trials the British Government bought the secret, and other rights. Imitations were, of course, soon attempted in other countries, and a type, called the Schwartzkopf, was for some years manufactured in Berlin and used in the German and Spanish navies; it was also tried by the Italians and Japanese, but it failed in the end to hold its own against the Whitehead.

The automobile torpedo was at first used only for the armament of ordinary war-ships; it was not until 1879 that an American engineer named Mortensen designed a submarine with a torpedo-tube in the bows. His example was followed by Berkeley and Hotchkiss in 1880, by Garrett in his first Nordenfelt boat of 1881, and by Woodhouse and by Lagane in the same year. Even after this Drzewiecki, Tuck, and D’Allest designed their submarines without torpedo-tubes, but they were, in fact, indispensable, and the use of the Whitehead torpedo has been for the last twenty years assumed as the main function of all submarines designed for war.

The Submarine in War.—The difficulties of construction, propulsion, and armament having now been solved, the submarine at last took its place among the types of war-ships in the annual lists. From the first England and France held a marked lead, and in Brassey’s Naval Annual for 1914 the submarine forces of the chief naval Powers were given as follows:—Great Britain, 76 vessels built and 20 ordered; France, 70 and 23; the U.S.A., 29 and 31; Germany, 27 and 12. The technical progress of the four services was probably more equal than their merely numerical strength; but it was not altogether equal, as may be seen by a brief comparison of the development of the British and German submarine types between 1904 and 1914. The eight British A-boats of 1904 had a displacement of 180 tons on surface/207 tons submerged; the German U1 of 1904–6 was slightly larger (197/236) but in every other respect inferior—its horse-power was only 250 on surface/100 submerged, as against 550/150, its surface speed only 10 knots against 11·5, and it was fitted with only a single torpedo-tube instead of the A-boat’s two. This last deficiency was remedied in 1906–8, but the German displacement did not rise above 210/250 nor the horse-power above 400/150, while the British advanced to 550/660 and 1200/550. By 1913 the Germans were building boats of 650/750 displacement and 1400/500 horse-power, but the British were still ahead with 725/810 and 1750/600, and had also a superiority in speed of 16/10 knots to 14/8. The last German boats of which any details have been published are those of 1913–14, with a displacement of about 800 tons on the surface and a maximum speed of 18/7 knots. The British F-boats of the same date are in every way superior to these, with a displacement of 940/1200, a speed of 20/12 knots, and an armament of six torpedo-tubes against the German four. The comparison cannot be carried, in figures, beyond the date of the outbreak of war, but it is well known among the allies of Great Britain that the superiority has been amply maintained, and, in certain important respects, materially increased.

The four years of conflict have, however, afforded an opportunity for a further, and even more important, comparison. The problems of submarine war are not all material problems: moral qualities are needed to secure the efficient working of machinery, the handling of the ship under conditions of danger and difficulty hitherto unknown in war, and the conduct of a campaign with new legal and moral aspects of its own. In two of these departments, those of efficiency and seamanship, the Germans have achieved a considerable show of success, though it could be, and in time will be, easily shown that the British naval service has been more successful still. But in the domain of policy and of international morality, the comparison becomes no longer a comparison but a contrast; the new problems have been dealt with by the British in accordance with the old principles of law and humanity; by the Germans they have not been solved at all, the knot has simply been cut by the cruel steel of the pirate and the murderer. The methods of the U-boat campaign have not only brought successive defeats upon Germany, they will in the end cripple her commerce for many years; and, in addition to her material losses, she will suffer the bitter consequences of moral outlawry.

Of the general efficiency of the German submarines it is too soon to speak, but it may be readily admitted that they have done well. We know, of course, many cases of failure—cases in which boats have been lost by defects in their engines, by running aground through mishandling in shoal waters, or by inability to free themselves from British nets. On the other hand, the German patrol has been kept up with a degree of continuity which, when we remember the dislocation caused by their severe losses, is, at least, a proof of determination. But the British submarine service has to its credit a record of work which, so far as can be judged from the evidence available, is not only better but has been performed under more difficult and dangerous circumstances. In the North Sea patrolling has been carried out regularly, in spite of minefields and of possible danger from the British squadrons, which must, of course, be avoided as carefully as if they were enemies. The German High Seas Fleet has been, for the most part, in hiding, but on the rare and brief occasions when their ships have ventured on one of their furtive raids British submarines have done their part, and the only two German Dreadnoughts which have risked themselves outside Kiel since their Jutland flight were both torpedoed on the same day. Better opportunities, as we shall see later, were found in the Baltic, where British submarines, in spite of German and Swedish nets, ice-fields, and the great distance of bases, succeeded in establishing a complete panic, by torpedoing a number of German war vessels and the cargo ships which they were intended to safeguard.

But it was in the Gallipoli campaign that the conditions were most trying and most novel. The British submarines detailed for the attack in Turkish waters had to begin by navigating the Dardanelles against a very rapid current, setting strongly into a succession of bays. They had to pass searchlights, mines, torpedo-tubes, nets and guard-boats; and in the Sea of Marmora they were awaited by a swarm of cruisers, destroyers, and patrol-boats of all kinds. Yet, from the very first, they were successful in defeating all these. Boat after boat went up without a failure, and maintained herself for weeks at a time without a base, returning with an astonishing record of losses inflicted on the enemy. These records will be given more fully in a later chapter; but that of E. 14, Lieut.-Commander Courtney Boyle, may be quoted here as an example, because it is no exceptional instance but merely the earliest of a number, and set a standard which was well maintained by those who followed. The passage of the narrows was made through the Turkish mine-field, and its difficulty may be judged by the fact that E. 14, during the first 64 hours of the voyage, was diving for 44 hours and 50 minutes. After she began her patrol work, there was more than one day on which she was under fire the whole day, except when she dived from time to time. The difficulty of using her torpedoes was extreme; but she succeeded in hitting and sinking two transports, one of which was 1,500 yards distant and escorted by three destroyers. Finally when, after twenty-two days’ patrolling, she began her return voyage, she was shepherded by a Turkish gunboat, a torpedo-boat, and a tug, one each side of her and one astern, and all hoping to catch her in the net; but by deep and skilful diving she escaped them, and cleared the net and the mine-field at a speed of 7 knots.

Her second patrol extended over twenty-three days. This time the tide was stronger, and the weather less favourable. The total number of steamers, grain dhows and provision ships, sunk on this patrol, amounted to no less than ten, and the return voyage was successfully accomplished, the boat tearing clean through an obstruction off Bokali Kalessi.

The third patrol was again twenty-two days. An hour after starting, E. 14 had her foremost hydroplane fouled by an obstruction which jammed it for the moment, and threw the ship eight points off her course. After a quick scrape she got clear, but found afterwards that her guard wire was nearly cut through. On this trip the wireless apparatus was for a time out of order, but was successfully repaired; eight good ships were burnt or sunk, one of them being a supply ship of 5,000 tons. The return voyage was the most eventful of all. E. 14 came full against the net at Nagara, which had apparently been extended since she went up. The boat was brought up from 80 feet to 45 feet in three seconds, but broke away uninjured, with her bow and periscope standards scraped and scored.

The efficiency of the boat and her crew were beyond praise. Since leaving England E. 14 had run over 12,000 miles and had spent nearly seventy days at close quarters with the enemy in the Sea of Marmora; she had never been in a dockyard or out of running order; she had had no engine defects except such as were immediately put right by her own engine-room staff. Yet she made no claim to be better than her consorts. Nor did she make any boast of her humane treatment of captured enemies; she merely followed the tradition of the British Navy in this matter, and the principles of law as accepted by all civilised nations. The commander of a submarine, whether British or German, has to contend with certain difficulties which did not trouble the cruiser captain of former wars. He cannot spare, from his small ship’s company, a prize crew to take a captured vessel into port; he cannot, except in very rare cases, hope to take her in himself; and, again, if he is to sink her, he cannot find room in his narrow boat for more than one or two prisoners. What he can do is to see that non-combatants and neutrals, at least, shall be exposed as little as possible to danger or suffering; he can give them boats and supplies and every opportunity of reaching land in safety. No one needs to be told how the Germans, either of their own native cruelty or by the orders of a brutal and immoral Higher Command, have in such circumstances chosen to deal with their helpless fellow-men, and even with women and children, and with the wounded and those attending them. But it may be well to put in evidence some of the brief notes in which a typical British submarine commander has recorded as a matter of course his own method on similar occasions. ‘May 8. Allowed two steamers full of refugees to proceed.’ ‘June 20. Boarded and sank 3 sailing dhows; towed crew inshore and gave them some biscuit, beef, and rum and water, as they were rather wet.’ ‘June 22. Let go passenger ship. 23. Burnt two-master and started to tow crew in their boat, but had to dive. Stopped 2 dhows: crews looked so miserable that I only sank one and let the other go. 24. Blew up 2 large dhows; saw 2 heads in the water near another ship; turned and took them up exhausted, gave them food and drink and put them on board their own ship.’ ‘July 30. Burnt sailing vessel with no boat and spent remainder of afternoon trying to find a craft to get rid of her crew into. Found small sailing boat and got rid of them.’ ‘August 3. Burnt large dhow. Unfortunately, 9 on board, including 2 very old men, and their boat was small, so I had to take them on board and proceed with them close to the shore—got rid of them at 9.30 P.M.’

As for the hospital ships, there were numbers of them coming and going; but, empty or full, it is inconceivable that the British Navy should make war upon hospital ships. Victory it will desire, but not by villainy; defeat it will avoid strenuously, but not by the destruction of the first law of human life. The result is none the less certain: in the history of submarine war, as in that of all naval war, it will inevitably be seen that piracy and murder are not the methods of the strong.

CHAPTER III
THE SUBMARINE OF TO-DAY

The feelings of the average landsman, when he sets foot for the first time in a submarine, are a strong mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The curiosity is uppermost—the experience before you is much more novel than, for example, that of a first trip in an aeroplane. From a mountain or tower, a great wheel or a balloon, you have seen the bird’s-eye view of the earth and felt the sensation of hanging over the aerial abyss. But even the fascinating pages of Jules Verne have not told you all that you will feel in a submarine, and nothing but physical experience can do so. You are eager to see the working of new mechanical devices in a wholly strange element, and to learn the use of a new weapon in a wholly strange kind of war. But with this eagerness, there is an underlying sense of uneasiness, a feeling that you are putting yourself into a position where you are as helpless as a mouse in a patent trap. The cause of this is not fear of war risks, for it is equally strong in harbour, or in time of peace. It is probably connected with the common dread of suffocation, which may be an instinct inherited from ages of primitive life in the open. They will tell you, in the submarine service, that it is a mere habit of mind and very soon forgotten. There is even a story of an officer who, on coming ashore from a year’s work in an E-boat, refused to travel in the Tube railway, because it looked so dangerous. He preferred the risks he was used to, and so do most of us.

You stand, then, at the foot of the narrow iron ladder down which you have come from the upper air, you gag your inherited instinct, and let your curiosity loose. Before the boat dives, there is time for a good deal to be taken in. The interior seems large beyond expectation. This is partly an illusion, produced by the vista of the compartments, fore and aft of the central control where you are standing. The bulkhead doors being all open at this moment, you can see into the engine and motor rooms towards the stern, and forward through the battery compartment to the bow torpedo-tubes. The number of men seems large too, and they are all busy; but you note that every part of them is more active than their feet—there is very little coming and going. In the control, close to you, are the captain, a lieutenant, a steersman, and seven or eight other men for working the ballast tanks, air valves, electrical apparatus, and hydroplanes. The last two of them have just come down from the deck—the hatches are closed—engines have already been running for some minutes, though the order escaped your observation.

You are invited ‘to see her dive.’ You go up to the forward conning-tower scuttle and flatten your face against the thick glass. An order is given. You hear the hissing of air, as the ballast tanks are filled. You expect to see the forward part of the boat dip down into the water in which she is heaving. Instead of that, it is apparently the sea which lifts itself up, moves along the deck, and seems to be coming in a huge slow wave over your scuttle. The light of day gives place to a green twilight, full of small bubbles. Mentally you feel a slight chill; but physically, a warm and sticky sensation. As there is nothing more to be seen out of window, you return to your instructor. He explains to you that the ship is now running on her motors, and that her speed is therefore low—not nearly enough to overhaul a vessel or convoy of any power. On the surface, with her other engines, she could far more than double the pace; and even with the motors, she could do a spurt for a short time—but spurts are very expensive; for they use up the battery power with ruinous rapidity, and then a return to the surface will be necessary, whether safe or not.

At this point it may strike you suddenly that you are now under water—you begin to wonder how deep you are, and why you have not perceived any change in the boat’s position. The answer is that the depth marked on the gauges is only twenty feet, and the angle of descent was therefore very slight—much too slight to be perceptible in the short length of a single compartment. The depth of twenty feet is now being maintained with surprising steadiness; the explanation is that two entirely separate forces are at work. First, there are the horizontal rudders or hydroplanes, fitted outside the vessel both fore and aft, by which she can be forced down, provided she has sufficient way on, in much the same fashion as an ordinary vertical rudder forces a ship to one side or the other. But this is only the diving apparatus; to keep her down, there is her water ballast—the water which was taken into her main ballast tanks, when the order to submerge was given. These tanks contain a sufficient weight of water to counteract the normal buoyancy of the boat, by which she would naturally float upon the surface. When they are emptied, she will neither sink nor rise of her own motion—she will lie or run at whatever depth she is placed, by her hydroplanes or otherwise.

These, you will have noticed, were called the ‘main’ ballast tanks—there would seem then to be others. There are, and several kinds of them. First, there is an auxiliary ballast tank, which has a peculiar use of its own. A submarine must be able to float or submerge in fresh water as well as at sea; for her base or harbour will often be in the mouth of a river, or she may have to navigate a river, a canal, or a lake. It is a point that would not probably have occurred to you, but the difference between the density of fresh and salt water is sufficiently great to make a real difficulty here. Everyone knows that it is less easy to float in fresh water, and less easy to sink in salt. For practical purposes, a submerged boat is less buoyant in fresh water by 26 tons in 1000, and vice versa; so that when a submarine of 1000 tons leaves a river for the sea, she must take an extra 26 tons of ballast to keep her down, and when she comes home again she must get rid of 26 tons, or she will sink so much deeper in the fresh water. For this purpose she has a special tank of the right size, proportioned to her tonnage; and it is placed in the middle of the ship, in order that it may not interfere with her trim when it is filled or emptied.

That last remark will put you in mind that, in any kind of navigation, the trim of the boat is a delicate and important matter. Even in very large and heavy ships you may be able, by shifting guns or cargo, to slip off a shoal, or right a leaking vessel after a collision. In a tickle boat like a submarine, it is necessary to have some means of trimming the vessel, fore or aft, at any moment, and especially when about to dive, or when caught by some under-water obstruction. Tanks are therefore fitted for this purpose at each end of the boat. They are comparatively small, because the effect required is in ordinary circumstances very limited, and in a desperate emergency they may need to be supplemented by rushing the crew fore or aft, as living ballast. An example of this will be found in a later chapter.

You may now feel that you have heard enough of tanks; but your instructor will insist on showing you a whole additional series. He will make a point of your recognising that a submarine, when submerged, is in reality hanging in the water as a balloon hangs in the air, and for every loss of weight she must be instantaneously compensated, or she will begin to rise. What loss of weight can she suffer while actually under water? It is not perhaps very hard to guess. There is, first of all, the consumption of oil by the engines; secondly, the consumption of food and fresh water by the crew; and thirdly, the departure from time to time of torpedoes. Also, when on the surface, there may be gun ammunition fired away, or other things heaved overboard, and allowance must be made for this when the boat goes down again. The modern submarine is prepared to keep her balance under all such circumstances. She has compensating tanks, and they are placed as near as possible to the oil-tank, fresh-water tank, or torpedo-tube, for whose diminished weight they are to compensate.

You are probably more interested in the torpedo-tubes than in the oil-tanks. It is time then to go forward. You pass through the battery compartment, where the officers’ quarters are, and are shown (under the floor) the accumulators, ranged like the honey sections in the frames of a beehive, and very carefully covered over with flexible waterproof covering as well as with close-jointed planking. What would happen if water did find its way down to the batteries? An instant discharge of chlorine gas, blinding and suffocating. What would you do then? Come to the surface at all costs—and lucky if you are in time! The Germans know all about that—and not long ago one of our own boats was only saved by the good goal-keeping of a lieutenant, who caught up a lid of some sort, and stood by the leak, neatly fending off the water spurt from the door of the battery compartment.

Now you are in the forward torpedo compartment, and there are the tubes. I need not say anything about their size or number—you will realise at a glance that when a couple are loosed off at once, a good deal of weight goes out of the ship. The ordinary 18-inch fish is 17 feet long, and takes some handling. The explosive alone in her war-head weighs as much as a big man, say 12½ stone, and a 21-inch fish carries twice as much as that, packed in some four feet of her length. Behind that comes the air chamber—another ten feet—with the compressed air to drive the engine, which is in her stern. The air is stored at a pressure of over 2000 lbs. to the square inch; so the steel walls of the chamber must be thick, and this makes another heavy item. Lastly, there is the engine-box with its four-cylinder engine, two propellers, gyroscope and steering gear. Altogether, an 18-inch fish will weigh nearly three-quarters of a ton, and a 21-inch over 2000 lbs., so that the amount of compensation needed when you fire, is considerable.

To see how it is done, we will imagine ourselves firing this starboard tube. The torpedo is got ready, and special care is taken to make sure that the firing-pin in her nose is not forgotten. Cases have been known in which a ship has been hit full by a torpedo which did not explode—just as a good many Zeppelin bombs were found in London, after the early raids, with the detonating pin not drawn. The fish is now ready to come alive, and is slid into the tube. The door is shut behind it, and the water-tight outer door, at the other end of the tube, is now ready to be opened by powerful levers. But the immediate result of this opening would be an inrush of sea-water which would weigh the boat’s head down; for though the fish’s belly fits the tube pretty closely, there is a good deal of empty space where it tapers towards the nose and tail. Here comes in the tank system. When the tube is loaded, this empty space is filled by water from within the ship, so that no change of weight occurs when you open the outer door. But when the firing-button has been pushed, and the torpedo has been shot out by an air-charge behind it there is no possibility of preventing the whole tube from filling with water, and this water must be got rid of before the tube can be reloaded. To do this, you first close the outer door again; then you have to deal with the tubeful of water. A good part of it is what the ship herself supplied to fill the space round the torpedo; and this must be pumped back into the special tank it came from. The remainder is the sea-water which rushed in, to take the place left empty by the departing torpedo: and this must be pumped into another special tank to prevent the ship feeling the loss of the torpedo’s weight. When you get a fresh supply of torpedoes, these special compensating tanks (which are really a kind of dummy torpedoes) will be emptied out, one for each new torpedo. Meantime, you have now got the tube empty, and can open the inner door and reload.

But what of the torpedo which has been fired? It is travelling towards its mark at a speed of between thirty-five and forty knots, if we suppose the range to be an ordinary one, under 1000 yards, and the torpedo to have been ‘run hot,’ i.e. driven by hot air instead of cold. The compressed air is heated mechanically inside the torpedo, in the act of passing from the air chamber to the machinery, and this increases both the speed and range. But it is not always convenient or possible to start the heating apparatus, and even when ‘run cold’ the fish will do thirty knots. This speed is amazing, but it is one of the least wonderful of the torpedo’s qualities. The steering of the machine is a double miracle. One device makes it take, after the first plunge, exactly the depth you desire, and another—a gyroscope fitted inside the rudder gear—keeps it straight on its course; or makes it, if you wish, turn in a circle and strike its prey, boomerang fashion. The head of the fish can also be fitted with cutters which will cut through any torpedo-netting that a ship can afford to carry. The only thing that no ingenuity can accomplish is to make a torpedo invisible during its run. The compressed air, when it has passed through the engine, must escape, and it comes to the surface in a continuous boiling line of bubbles. This is visible at a considerable distance; and though, when the track is sighted by the look-out, the torpedo itself is of course always well ahead of the nearest spot where the bubbles are seen rising, it is surprising how often ships do succeed in avoiding a direct shot. A prompt cry from the look-out, a steersman ready to put his helm over instantly, and the torpedo goes bubbling past, a few feet ahead or astern, or comes in on a tangent and runs harmlessly along the ship’s side without exploding. Then away it goes across the open sea, until the compressed air is exhausted, the engine stops, and the mechanical sinker sends it to the ocean bed, which must be fairly strewn with dead torpedoes by this time; for as we know, to our advantage, the proportion of misses to hits is very large in the U-boat’s record.

Now that you have seen the weapon—and can at any rate imagine the handling of it—you are naturally keen to sight the game, and realise the conditions of a good shot. You go back to the central compartment, where the Commander is ready to show you a ship through the periscope. Not, of course, an enemy ship—in this war, if you want a shot at an enemy ship, you must go into his own waters—into the Bight or the Baltic—to find him; and even there he is probably tucked up very tight in his berth, with chained barges and heavy nets all round him, and mines all up the approach. But there are plenty of our own ships out every day—sweeping, cruising, trading; and transporting men, food, mails, and munitions. And what you see will help you to understand why the Germans have spent so many torpedoes, and sunk so comparatively small a proportion of our enormous tonnage.

The boat is now less deep in the water; the gauges mark 15 feet, and you are told that the top of the periscope is therefore some two feet above the surface. The shaft of it is round, like a large vertical piston; but at the bottom it ends in a flattened box, with a hand-grip projecting on each side. You take hold of the grips and look into the box. Nothing is visible but an expanse of water, with a coast-line of low hills beyond it—all in miniature. The Commander presses the back of your left hand on the grip, and you move round slowly as the periscope revolves. The coast-line goes out of the picture, the sea lies open to the horizon, and upon it appears a line of odd-looking spots. They are moving; for the nearest one, which was narrow a moment ago, is now three or four times as broad, and is in a different place in the line.

The line, you are told, is not a line at all, but a convoy, in fairly regular formation. The nearest spot is a destroyer, zigzagging on the flank; the others are ships which have been so effectively ‘dazzled’ that their shapes are unrecognisable. You carry on, in hope of something nearer, and suddenly a much larger object comes into the field of vision. A ship, of course, though it does not look like any ship you have ever seen; and you are asked to guess its distance and direction. You are bewildered at first; for as you were moving the lens rapidly to starboard, the vessel came in rapidly to port, and as her dazzle-paint makes her stern indistinguishable from her bows, you continue to think she is steaming in that direction. After a more careful observation, this mistake is corrected. She is crossing us from port to starboard. But at what angle? This is vitally important, for the possibility of getting in a successful shot would depend entirely upon the answer. We are ourselves heading about due north: she is crossing to the east: if her course is south of east, she is coming nearer to us, and our torpedo would strike her before the beam—the most favourable chance. If, on the contrary, her course is north of east she is going away, and the torpedo would have a poor chance of hitting her abaft the beam. In fact, it would not be worth while to risk losing so costly a shot. A torpedo at present prices is worth not far short of £2000, and we only carry two for each tube.

You look long and hard at this dazzle-ship. She doesn’t give you any sensation of being dazzled; but she is, in some queer way, all wrong—her proportions are wrong, she is somehow not herself, not what she ought to be. If you fix your attention on one end of her, she seems to point one way—if you look away at her other end, she is doing something different. You can’t see the height of her funnels clearly, or their relative position. But, with care, you decide that she is coming about south-east and will be therefore your bird in two minutes’ time. The Commander is interested. He takes a look himself, laughs, and puts you back at the eye-piece. You hold on in hope that he may, after all, be wrong; but the bird ends by getting well away to the north-east. Your error covered just ninety degrees, and the camouflage had beaten you completely. You begin to think that the ingenuity at command of the nation has been underestimated. But this ship is nothing of a dazzle, the Commander tells you—he can show you one whose cut-water seems always to be moving at a right angle to her stern!

‘Does not look like any ship you have ever seen.’

He adds that he knew all about that cruiser, and she knew all about him. Otherwise he would not have shown even his periscope; and if he had, she would have had a shell into him by now, and a depth-charge to follow. A depth-charge is perhaps the most formidable weapon against which the submarine has to be on guard. It is a bomb, with a detonator which can be set to explode when it reaches any given depth. A small one would need to hit the mark full, or be very close to it, in order to get a satisfactory result; but the newer and larger ones will seriously damage a submarine within an area of forty yards. The charge is either dropped over the stern of the pursuing vessel, when she is thought to be just over or just ahead of the enemy; or it is fired out of a small and handy short-range howitzer—a kind of lob-shot, a number of which can be made by several patrol boats acting together, so as to cover a larger area with much less risk of embarrassing each other. Even if the submarine is not destroyed outright, the chances are in such a case that she will be so damaged as to be forced to the surface or to the bottom, and then the end is certain. A bad leak would bring her up—an injury to her tanks or rudders might drive her down.

You are uncomfortably reminded once more of that inherited dislike of death by suffocation. If a submarine cannot rise to the surface, you ask, is there no possible means of escape? The answer is that it may be possible, with great difficulty, to get out of the boat; but there is very little chance that you would survive. The lungs are not fitted to bear so great and sudden a change of pressure as that felt in passing from the boat to the water, and from the deep water to the surface. You are perhaps surprised; but the pressure of sea-water at 160 feet is equal to five atmospheres, or about 75 lbs. to the square inch. To pass safely through this to the ordinary surface atmosphere would need a long and gradual process, and not a sudden rise of a few seconds. A very brave attempt was made on one occasion, when a British submarine had gone to the bottom during her trials, and could not be got up by any effort of her crew. The agony of the situation was intensified by the fact that help was close at hand, if only the alarm could be given, and the whereabouts of the submarine communicated to the rescuers. The officers of the sunken boat were, of course, perfectly aware of the danger from sudden change of pressure; but one of them volunteered to go to the surface, alive or dead, and carry a message on the chance of attracting some ship’s attention. To lessen the risk as far as possible, it was arranged that he should go up into the conning-tower, and that the hatch should then be closed beneath him and the water gradually admitted. As it flowed slowly in, and mounted round him, the air in the top of the conning-tower would diminish in extent but increase in pressure. When it reached his neck, the internal pressure would be nearly equal to the external. He would be able to open the top, possibly to make his escape, and conceivably to reach the surface without his lungs being fatally injured. If he failed, he would at any rate have given his life for the chance of saving his comrades.

The Commander accompanied him into the conning-tower, meaning, it is said, to return into the ship himself when he had seen to all the arrangements. But when the water was admitted, the two of them were shot out together, and as it happened it was the volunteer who was killed, by striking against the superstructure, while the Commander came up alive. In no long time—though it must have seemed unendurably long to those below, waiting in complete uncertainty—the rescuers were informed, found the submarine, and got a hawser under her stern. They raised her high enough out of the water, vertically, to open a hatch and save the crew. Then the hawser gave, and the boat went down again.

That story is not unlikely to haunt you all the way home, and for a long time afterwards. It may even make a difference to your whole feeling about the war under water, as waged by our own Service. The submarine is not merely an incredibly clever box of mechanical toys, nor is it only the fit weapon of a cruel and ruthless enemy; it is also a true part of the Navy without fear and without reproach, whose men play the great game for each other and for their country, and play it more greatly than we know. The tune of their service is a kind of undertone; but it is in the heroic key, and cannot fall below it.

CHAPTER IV
A BRITISH SUBMARINE BASE

Our submarine now returns to the surface. She is proceeding on patrol, and her commander, as he bids us good-bye, recommends us to put into the port from which he has just come, and see what a submarine base is like. We take his advice, and return to our trawler. Her head is turned westward and signals are made and answered. The skipper informs us that we are about to pass through a mine-field where the mines are as thick as herring-roe. It is some consolation to hear that ‘The Sweep’ has already done its daily morning work, and that the channel is presumably clear.

The East Coast of England, from Tynemouth to Thames mouth, is pierced with some ten or a dozen estuaries, all more or less suitable for flotilla bases. It is unnecessary to say how many of these are used by our submarines, or which of them it is that we are about to enter. But a short description can do no harm, because one of these bases is very like another, and all are absolutely impervious to enemy craft. Even if they could navigate the mine-field, so thickly strewn with both our mines and their own, and so constantly and thoughtfully rearranged, they would not find it possible to slip, as we are doing, past the elaborate boom at the harbour mouth, or to escape being sunk by the guns which dominate it, and the seaplanes which are constantly passing over it.

And now that we are inside, it looks an even more dangerous place for an intruder—a perfect hornets’ nest. Close to us on the left lies a small pier, with buildings on a hill behind it—the Commodore’s house and offices, seamen’s training-school, and gymnasium. At the pier-head are two or three picket-boats; and a little further on, a light cruiser with her observation balloon mounted. The vast sheds beyond are the hangars of the Air Service. They are painted in a kind of Futurist style, which gives them a queer look from below, but makes them, when seen from a thousand feet up, either invisible or like a landscape of high roads, cornfields, hay-stacks and groups of trees—objects quite uninviting to any stray air-raider. But their best protection is the efficiency of the machines and men inside them.

Over on the opposite side of the river stretches a long quay. The background of it is a naval railway station; the ships lying in front of it are partly supply ships, partly merchant vessels brought in under convoy, and two of them are depot ships, moored permanently there, and used as headquarters for the Submarine, Destroyer, and other services. Out in the centre of the harbour lies a still larger depot ship, the floating headquarters of the Admiral who is Commodore of the port; and behind her, in two long lines, stretching away upstream into the far distance, lies an apparently inexhaustible force of light cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer-leaders, with here and there a submarine—one is slung aloft in a dry-dock for overhauling. A side creek to the left is crowded with trawlers and drifters, whose men are now ashore ‘between sweeps.’ At this hour of the day the place is at its fullest, for the daily ‘Beef Trip,’ or food convoy, has just come in, and the dozen destroyers which escorted it are all lying at their moorings, on both sides of the main stream line. There they will be till to-night, when at 7 o’clock to the second they will all slip away again into the twilight like thin grey ghostly dogs, shepherding another flock of very substantial sheep.

The trawler puts us aboard the depot ship; but the Admiral is not there. A picket-boat takes us over to his pier, and we find him in his chart-room, surrounded by maps marked with spots and figures in different colours, quite unintelligible except to those who have the key, and even to them no subject for conversation at large. But the Admiral is a good talker, his mind is an encyclopædia of submarine war and the working of a naval base, and he is amazingly quick in separating the facts which interest you, and yet are fit for repetition outside, from those which you must forget as soon as you have heard them. He begins by explaining the daily routine of the port—the mine-sweeping, which is done regularly twice a day, but at what times the enemy can only guess, and the mine-laying, which is a game of brain against brain, each side trying to see through the other’s devices and catch him with their own. An elementary example would be the obvious dodge of moving the enemy’s mine a short distance, instead of removing it altogether—so that when next he comes that way, he shall run into it unexpectedly, and perish by his own trap. But this, as I have described it, is too simple a device to be successful, and the ingenuity of our mine-layers has improved upon it by a dozen skilful variations. Much can be done by studying carefully the habits of the German mind. One officer, who is specially skilled in this matter, has the credit of being able to make a U.C.-boat lay her eggs just where he pleases, and of knowing exactly when it will be time to go and collect them.

Our own mine-laying and coastal patrol would be more exciting if the possible successes were not limited to an occasional submarine. It is a little dull to be always laying traps for a flotilla that never comes. The work of our coastal submarines is therefore monotonous; but it is none the less invaluable. Besides making sure, it trains a continual succession of crews for oversea work, and gives experience to young commanders. The number of boats increases every year, and the flow of volunteer entries keeps pace with it. The standard demanded is very high, and it is fully maintained. The prize of efficiency is immediate entry into the hardships and dangers of the oversea patrol.

There is no doubt that the hardships are more trying to our men than the dangers. The oversea patrol is kept up through the winter. The weather off the enemy’s coast is often very severe, and boats have to be shut down for long periods. In summer, the work of diving patrols is almost equally arduous, owing to the longer hours of daylight. Boats must frequently be submerged for nineteen or twenty hours at a time; and after the first twelve of these, the air, in spite of purifiers, becomes oppressive to breathe—not even the head of a match will burn. Then there are two special conditions tending towards depression. First, the positive results are few, and form no measure of the work or the risks. Results are obtained, but never in proportion to the devotion and sanguine hopes of the Service. It is a baffling and trying experience to live for days with your eye glued to a periscope—the field of vision is contracted, and too close to the water. The psychological effect of the strain would be bad in the case of any but highly trained and selected officers—as one of them has said, the sighting of a surface enemy is a relief seldom obtained. The Germans are fortunate in the daily, almost hourly, sighting of targets. But their officers, in consequence of continual heavy losses, are commonly sent to sea undertrained, and their results are naturally poor in proportion to the torpedoes expended.

The second of the two causes which would discourage any but the finest spirit, is the fact that an almost complete silence broods over the Submarine Service. Not only is the work done mostly in the deep-sea twilight; but, however arduous and creditable it may be, it is seldom recognised publicly. Rewards are given, but not openly. A commander may reappear for a day or two among his friends, wearing the ribbon of the D.S.O. or the V.C., or both, but little or nothing will be published of the actions by which he won them. It is not only that information must be kept from reaching the enemy—and naturally the German Admiralty is always anxious to know how their boats are lost—but there is also a settled custom in our Navy, a custom older than the Submarine Service, by which ‘mention in despatches’ is confined to incidents during which one or both sides have been under fire, from gun or torpedo. Custom in the Navy is generally a sound rule; but in this particular instance, the custom did not grow up to fit the case, and does not fit it. The Admiral does not say anything on this point; but he tells us that the real danger a submarine commander has to face is not the gun or the torpedo. He may come off his patrol without having been shot at by either, and yet may be entitled to the credit of having been in action for days and nights on end. In fact, every minute that he is in enemy waters he is in danger from mines, and from a host of formidable pursuers—aeroplanes and Zeppelins with bombs, and fast anti-submarine craft with depth-charges and explosive sweeps. No doubt all ships are to some extent in danger from mines, but no other class of vessel is asked to run the gauntlet on the enemy’s coast to anything like the same extent. If surface ships are sent, they are sent for a single operation, the ground is prepared for them as far as possible, the period of exposure is short, and when the work is done the force is withdrawn. But our submarines are, for days and weeks at a time, close to known mine-fields and in areas most likely to hold new or drifted mines. They are harassed by hunters to whom they can make no reply, and particularly by aircraft, which can detect them even at sixty feet below the surface. The areas in which they work are comparatively narrow, and so closely patrolled by small craft that it is seldom possible to come to the surface in daylight; navigation, too, is very difficult, and the rapidly changing densities of the water off the enemy’s coast make the trimming of the boat and the depth control a matter of constant anxiety.

Yet not only are officers and men found in plenty to enter this service of twilight and silence, but the keenness they show for it is unfailing. The work itself is their one ambition, and their records are astounding. Ask the Captain (S.) of this port. In two years he has organised 370 cruises, lasting in all 1680 days, and extending over a surface mileage of more than 200,000 miles. There was only a single breakdown, and that ended in a triumph; for the Commander got himself towed back by an enemy trawler, neatly captured for the purpose. Another—Commander Talbot—made twenty-one cruises; Lieutenant C. Turner, nineteen; Commanders Goodhart and Leir, seventeen each; Commander Benning and Lieut. C. Moncreiffe, sixteen. More wonderful still is the fact that the first two of these officers spent fifty-six and sixty-five days respectively in enemy waters, and the other four from thirty-six to forty-nine days each. The most interesting part of their adventures cannot yet be told; but much may be guessed from an outline or two. Commander Leir, for instance, was repeatedly in action with Zeppelins, seaplanes, and anti-submarine craft, one of which he sank. He was present at the action in the Heligoland Bight in August 1914, and brought home some German prisoners. Commander Benning was also repeatedly in action. Once, after torpedoing an armed auxiliary cruiser, he was forced by enemy sweepers to dive into a German mine-field. There he had to stay, with batteries exhausted, till night gave him a chance of recharging. Another time he went down into a mine-field of his own will, to lie in wait for an armed auxiliary. He was there for three hours, but ambushed her successfully in the end, close to the German coast. Lieut.-Commander Turner covered 20,000 miles to his own score, and passed much of his time actually in the swept channels, with enemy patrols in sight the whole day. Sometimes he came up and fought them, sometimes they hunted him with depth-charges. For those who sleep in beds and travel in buses, it is an almost unimaginable life. ‘Yes,’ says the Admiral, ‘in this Service, officers need a two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage every hour they are at sea: and they have it.’

‘Towed back by an enemy trawler.’

The charts are put away. We move out, first to the gymnasium, where physical drill is going on, then towards the great air-sheds. As we approach the first of these, an officer meets us and hands a block to the Admiral with the morning report upon it.

The Admiral’s face lights up as he reads. ‘A lucky chance—something to interest you.’ The Beef Trip, it appears, which has just returned, was escorted as usual by two seaplanes, flying ahead of the convoy. The starboard one of these had sighted a submarine at 8.30 A.M. and swooped towards her instantly. She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her, but the two big depth-charges which were dropped in a flash, fell right into her wash and close to the conning-tower, which disappeared in the explosion.

An excellent bit of work! But the face of the officer standing by shows a distinct cloud. ‘What is it?’ Well, the fact is that the pilot of the other seaplane, a mile and a half away to port, had an impression that the submarine was British.

The pilot of the bomb-dropper is sent for and comes out at once—a fair-haired and very young lieutenant, with an air of perfectly undisturbed serenity. He is sure nothing is wrong—it is ‘only a muddle.’ His companion pilot had certainly sighted and spoken a British submarine some quarter of an hour earlier; but this was not the one. Also another boat, E. 134, was out on patrol in that precise direction, but she was not due in that spot till 11 o’clock, B.S.T., and it was highly improbable she would be there so much before her time. Besides, he knew the colour of a Hun conning-tower. Undoubtedly it was ‘only a muddle.’ The explanation sounds a good one, but it is a speculation, not a certainty; and on further inquiry, it appears that nothing has since been heard of E. 134. The Admiral sends off the young pilot with a word of good cheer; but when he has gone, he hands back the report with a serious look. The incident has become too interesting. It is no longer something to tell a visitor. We go into the sheds and spend the remainder of our time in viewing the huge Americas and Handley-Pages.

The rest of the story comes after lunch, when we go to visit the Captain (S.) in his depot ship. He has heard all about our pilot, and our submarine too. E. 134 lay all night in her billet, resting on the bottom at 140 feet and listening with all her hydrophones. In the morning her watch was rewarded; she heard, first, the monotonous low ticking of a German submarine’s motors passing near her on the outward patrol—then at 8.30 the heavy dull boom of two explosions close together—then not a sound more! Finally, at her appointed time, noting that the U-boat had never stirred again, she rose to the surface and came home in rear of the sweep. The muddle is cleared up, and in the best manner.

‘She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her.’

We discuss the dead submarine and ask whether she would be, or would have been, more formidable when used against a convoy than against a single ship. The Captain (S.) who has already been torpedoed once himself, thinks there can be no doubt on this subject. ‘A single ship is much more easily approached than a convoy—she has only one set of eyes on the look-out, from one position, and the enemy can stalk her without fear of being trodden on from other quarters. Convoys ought to escape nearly every time, and they do. Look at the record of this port—not one loss in two years.’ This opinion is based on experience, but the matter looks different from the point of view of the convoy escort, whose responsibility weighs upon him every day afresh. This we discover when we pass on to visit a destroyer-leader, at a later hour in the evening. She is being got ready for the night’s work and it is now just six, but her captain assures us that what remains of his time is entirely ours. He takes us down to his own room, an elegant and almost spacious apartment, very unlike anything to be seen in a destroyer of the ordinary type; and he, too, answers our question positively. ‘Which is easiest—to hit a single ship or a convoy? The question answers itself—a submarine ought to get at least one bird out of a covey every time! She does not do it, perhaps; but look at the trouble we take to prevent her. Think of all the work put in by the auxiliary patrol to keep the sea fairly clear to start with—armed yachts, trawlers, whalers, drifters, motor-launches, mine-sweepers, net-drifters and motor-boats, out day and night all round the whole coast of the U.K. That is their routine work; and besides that they supply escorts to individual ships of special value and to ocean convoys, when they have arrived at their port of initial entry, and are to be taken on elsewhere. Then there are the various kinds of protective devices for the ships themselves—the dazzle-painting, the smoke-boxes on broads, and the smoke-boxes for floating behind you. And since we are talking of these things, there is the work of the destroyers and trawlers on regular convoy.’ This is, of course, the captain’s own job, and we naturally hint a desire that he should pursue the subject.

‘There is no difficulty about it—the Germans already know all that they can ever know of our convoy system—how it is organised in the form of group-sailings on definite routes, and worked, as far as possible, at night, with extra protection given by daylight and during moonlight hours—above all, how successful it is, and how, little by little, they have given up the chase of mercantile convoys for the attack of transports and single ships of great size and value. In one month, for instance, of the present year, 690 vessels were convoyed from England to France, of which only three were attacked, and only two sunk, including one small sailing ship. More astonishing still, out of 693 convoyed from France to England in the same month not one was touched, or even attacked. Then there are the Dutch and Scandinavian lines.’

We should like to know exactly how it is done, and especially what part the destroyers play in the game. Briefly, but very sharply, the picture is drawn for us. You see a fine August day, off the coast of Scotland, with white summer clouds over a rippling sea; a compact convoy of eight ships sailing in two columns, with a ninth lagging on the left, three times her proper distance to the rear. Their speed is slow; they are flanked on both sides, fore and aft, by armed trawlers, with one just ahead of the two columns, and they are covered by two fast destroyers. The first of these is ahead of the convoy, zigzagging continuously from side to side across the whole front. The second is zigzagging in another direction. Suddenly, from this second destroyer, a signal is seen to fly. Her look-out has spotted the wake of a periscope 1000 yards away on her starboard bow, moving to cut off the convoy, from the right column of which it is already not more than 1500 yards distant. A torpedo fired at this moment should cross the convoy formation exactly in the middle, and would have an excellent chance of sinking either of the centre ships in either column—it could hardly miss all four. But the destroyer has in a moment altered course 8 points to starboard, and is prolonging this zigzag directly towards the enemy at thirty-odd knots, with her forward guns blazing. The U-boat captain, no doubt, longs to take his shot into the brown; but he has less than one minute in which to perform the more urgent duty of saving his own ship. Down he goes, with a depth-charge after him, and is not seen or heard of again in this story. The convoy calls up its lame duck and goes safely to its destination.

‘Yes,’ says the Captain, ‘we get them through, and it all looks very simple; but it’s mostly a matter of ten seconds, and you can’t grow fat on a daily margin of ten seconds.’

‘But the Admiral has something to say on your report?’

‘The Admiral writes outside, “Good look-out and prompt action of Swallow probably averted a casualty to the convoy.” He has to write that most days—he must be tired of writing it.’

It is now two minutes to seven. As we drop into our picket-boat, the destroyer slips silently from her moorings and fades away down stream with eleven other thin grey phantoms.

CHAPTER V
SUBMARINES AND WAR POLICY

‘Strategy,’ says the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ‘has been curtly described as the art of concentrating an effective fighting force at a given place at a given time, and tactics as the art of using it when there.’ In less scientific language, you fight a battle by means of tactics, and a campaign by means of strategy. But when nations live, as we have all been living for many years past, in constant preparation for war, there must be forethought as to the means and methods to be employed. Each nation has broad general plans, ready for the moment when fighting is decided upon, and ships, guns, and armies are provided accordingly. This is what is meant by war policy; and examples will come to mind at once. We live in a group of islands, with Dominions and other possessions overseas, and we have no desire to attack our continental neighbours. British war policy has therefore always been chiefly directed to the provision of an invincible navy for defending our shores and our commerce. The German Empire, on the other hand, is practically self-contained; it lies on the Continent, with land powers for neighbours whom it has long hoped and intended to dominate. German war policy, therefore, concerned itself until quite recently with plans for aggression by land, and only provided a powerful fleet when it became desirable to have a weapon in hand against England—not necessarily to fight us on equal terms, but, as they said themselves, to make us hesitate to take sides against them.

In this way it came about that both countries had a great naval war policy, and watched each other carefully, building dreadnoughts against dreadnoughts, and cruisers against cruisers. We made great and successful efforts to keep the lead; for sea power is a matter of life and death to us; and the Germans were spending every mark they could spare, to get more and more nearly upon even terms. It is certain that the war policy of both Powers took account of the possible uses of submarine boats; but the lines of thought which they followed were in some ways widely different, and they led, when war came, to unexpected developments. Let us consider for a few moments what the British admirals on the one hand, and the German on the other, intended to do with their submarine forces, and what they actually did when the time for action came.

British war policy was essentially non-aggressive. The Navy had but one possible antagonist of the first rank at sea, and that one we should never have fought with, except in a war of defence. Our submarines, therefore, had two obvious duties marked out for them. They would help in coast defence by making it dangerous for ships of war or transports to approach, and they might be used, if an opportunity arose, to attack a fleet in harbour, or a cruiser at sea. There was every probability that any fleet of a Power at war with us would sooner or later have to spend a good deal of time in port, and it would certainly be well to have the means to attack it there. But, important as this function was, the idea of defence against invasion probably came first, and there is no doubt that an efficient submarine force is a very formidable addition to our flotilla for coast defence. Perhaps we thought, in those years of perpetual preparation, too much about the ‘Invasion of England’ and too little about the duty of supporting our Allies on land; and we had this much justification, that the Power from which we had every reason to expect an attack, was one directed by men of great energy and determination, certain to be relentless in pressing a war home upon us, even at the risk of a heavy loss. On the other hand, those who spoke and wrote most about invasion, nearly always failed to realise the immense difficulty of the undertaking; and they failed especially to see that, in modern times, the conditions had changed very considerably in favour of the defence. The initial problem of an invader by sea must always be the provision of transport sufficient for a large body of troops, with arms, equipment, and supplies of food and munitions. Even if we allow only two tons of shipping per man—the Japanese allowed six tons—the transport of 100,000 men would take twenty vessels of 10,000 tons each, and to collect these and load them would be a big operation; difficult to conceal. In fact to conceal it, for a sufficiently long time, from a defence force well supplied with wireless telegraphy, fast scouts, and aerial observation, would now be a practical impossibility. But even if we suppose such an expedition to be able (under cover of fog, or by a complete surprise) to cross the North Sea unobserved, there remains the further difficulty of the landing. A place must be found where the invaders could obtain immediate control of supplies and communications; there are but half a dozen such places at most upon our eastern coast-line, and these are all prepared for a strenuous defence by land. If we add to the land defence a mine-field and the presence of an unknown number of submarines, the attempt becomes one involving the certainty of immense losses, and the extreme probability of failure. Even the German war-lords have not yet made up their minds to the risk of seeing eight or ten divisions drowned in an hour.

Besides coast defence and harbour attack, there might possibly be a chance for our submarines in a fleet action. Of that, all that can be said now is that our Submarine Service is believed to have shown greater promptness and ingenuity in its preparations than the German Admiralty, and awaits the next naval engagement with eager anticipation. But already it has been found practicable to use our submarines for two very important kinds of work, to an extent which was certainly quite unforeseen. One of these is the chase and destruction of enemy submarines—a kind of service which has been pronounced impossible, even in books written during the later stages of the War, but actual examples of which will be given in one of the chapters which describe our hunting methods. The other kind of work is the blockade of the enemy’s shipping trade and supply service, to be described when we come to the account of our submarine campaigns in the Baltic and Dardanelles.

If we turn now to German naval policy, we shall come at once upon an interesting point, which has not been generally understood. We have been told that the German Admiralty, before the War, was completely deceived as to the value of the submarine. And Mr. Marley Hay has been often quoted as saying that, in several conversations in 1911, Admiral von Tirpitz ‘expressed emphatically his opinion that he considered submarines to be in an experimental stage, of doubtful utility, and that the German Government was not at all convinced that they would form an essential or a conspicuous part of their future naval programme.’ Mr. Hay shows clearly that this was not said with the object of misleading; for he was urging Tirpitz to build, and the Admiral continued to refuse. When war broke out, the German Navy had only twenty-seven submarines built against seventy-six British and seventy French boats, and she was only building twelve more, against the twenty and twenty-three on our side. This may have been partly due to a miscalculation of their efficiency; but the main reason was probably that the directors of German war policy were (at that time) preparing for a war in which our Navy was to take no part. The account with England was to be settled at a later date. The immediate intention was to deal with France and Russia, and the assistance of the Austrian and Italian submarines in the Mediterranean was of course reckoned upon.

When war came these calculations were falsified. The German High Seas Fleet found itself unable to stand up to ours, and German war policy was forced to take a different direction. The U-boats’ first allotted task was the legitimate one of reducing our margin of superiority in battle-ships and cruisers. While our Fleet was certain to keep the sea, and protect our long coast-line and huge merchant tonnage, the German High Seas Fleet must lie in the Kiel Canal, risking only furtive and futile rushes into the open. But if the U-boats could hit a sufficient number of our more active war-ships, they might bring the forces nearer to an equality, and perhaps establish a prestige for their own Service. How they failed in this attempt we shall see presently.

When their failure in the game of attrition became evident, the U-boats were utilised in a different way. A submarine blockade of the British Isles was plainly threatened by Admiral von Tirpitz towards the end of 1914; and the official announcement of it was made on February 4, 1915. By this document it was declared that on and after February 18, every British or French merchant vessel found in the waters of the ‘war region’ round these islands ‘will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’ Neutral ships, it was added, would not be attacked unless by mistake; but they are warned not to take the risk.

Those who know even a little of the history of our old wars will see at a glance that this is a new move in naval war policy, and one made by the Germans to get over certain difficulties which arise from the very nature of submarine boats, and which are especially embarrassing when the submarines belong to a navy decidedly inferior to its enemies at sea. The old and well-established rules of naval war laid down that you could only interfere with merchant shipping if it were engaged in carrying contraband of war. To ascertain whether the ship you had sighted was carrying contraband or not, you had to board and search her. If innocent, you must let her proceed on her voyage. If apparently guilty, you took over her men or otherwise placed them in safety, put a prize crew on board and sent her home to a port of your own, to be tried legally by a properly constituted tribunal called a Prize Court. If this Court decided that she was, in fact, carrying contraband, she was your prize. If you were forced by stress of circumstances to destroy the prize, instead of sending her into port, you took every care to remove everyone on board before doing so; and when you had not room for so many people, you released the prize rather than endanger or sacrifice the lives of non-combatants.

All these humane rules could well be observed by any ordinary cruiser; and they were, in fact, kept by the Emden and other German cruisers when harrying British commerce in the East. But it is obvious at the first glance that a submarine would be continually in difficulties over them. It would always be risky for so fragile and unhandy a vessel to board and search a big ship, which might prove to be armed with guns or bombs. No submarine could find room for merchant crews or passengers in her own small compartments, and no submarine could afford to spare a prize crew for even one prize, or the time and horse-power to tow her into port. In short, it was plain, from the first, that the legitimate cruiser game could not be played at all by submarine boats. The Government of the United States put the truth unanswerably in these words: ‘The employment of submarines for the destruction of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the principles of humanity, with the long existing undisputed rights of neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’

‘Turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats.’

[See page 77.

The British Navy had an advantage here—the inestimable advantage of a force that could keep the sea against all its enemies. It was, therefore, possible for our submarines to stop an occasional ship with impunity, or to call up a destroyer and send a prize into port; and in the narrow waters of the Baltic and the Sea of Marmora, supply ships and merchantmen were captured and destroyed by them with every regard for the laws of humanity. But the German submarines had no fleet at sea to back their attempted blockade, and German war policy therefore took the downward course, hacking a way through the rules, and sacrificing, for the hope of victory, the very foundations of civilised human life. The U-boats began by turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats, no matter in what weather or how far from land. They went on to sink even great liners without search, and without warning; and they came finally down to the destruction of helpless men and women in boats, in order that the ships they had torpedoed might disappear without a trace—spürlos versenkt.