THE KAISER'S GAMBLE
During the First World War, U-boats were viewed by the Allied nations as savagery at sea, while many German commanders saw it as a viable means of breaking the stalemate. But was Wilhelm II really to blame for his country’s doomed strategy?
Germany was late to develop its own submarine, promoted vigorously by the German Torpedo Inspectorate despite opposition from the naval hierarchy. On the outbreak of the war in Europe in early August 1914 the Imperial German Navy possessed two flotillas comprising 28 operational U-boats – U1 to U28 – with U29 to U41 either nearing completion or in relatively advanced stages of construction. Of those which were operational, U1 to U4 were primitive designs, quickly relegated to training vessels, while U19 to U28, powered by new diesel engines over previous kerosene versions, were among the most advanced submarines yet built by any nation. Given that Germany was a relative latecomer to submarines the Imperial Navy began the conflict with two main misconceptions regarding their potential use.
First, after pre-war tactical trials using U1, U3 and U4, the German Torpedo Inspectorate concluded that the risk of collision required U-boats to operate geographically distanced from one another until such time as underwater signalling could be developed. Second, they were regarded as primarily a defensive weapon for use against an expected attack by the British Grand Fleet against the German High Seas Fleet. An attack was considered inevitable as Britain was expected to immediately maximise its material superiority. As a result, both U-boat flotillas were based in the island harbour on Heligoland to await the onslaught. After this failed to materialise, they went on the offensive and set out to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea. It proved an unpromising start.
Early tests and disasters
Ten U-boats sailed from Heligoland on 6 August to form a patrol line, with 11km between each boat near Dogger Bank. But within six days one had returned with one of its kerosene engines malfunctioning and two had been sunk. Kapitänleutnant Richard Pohle’s U15 mounted the first attempted U-boat torpedo attack against three dreadnought battleships between the Shetland and Orkney Islands, narrowly missing HMS Monarch. The following day, in misty conditions, Pohle’s boat was stationary on the surface when it was surprised by the light cruiser HMS Birmingham and rammed.
All 25 crewmen were killed. The other U-boat lost, U13, simply vanished at sea. The Allies had yet to lay any minefields and the submarine was presumed to have been the victim of an unexplained accident.
Following this miserable debut, German naval staff saw little future in the U-boat, which had neither inflicted damage nor ascertained the purpose of the Royal Navy deployment, thereby also failing as a reconnaissance device. But Korvettenkapitän Hermann Bauer, appointed Führer der U-boote (FDU), remained convinced of their offensive capabilities despite orders to merely maintain a static defensive line within the Heligoland Bight. Potential redemption arrived when British heavy warships were reported in the Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland and Bauer was allowed to dispatch two U-boats to attack them. Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing made history on 5 September 1914 when he sank the light cruiser HMS Pathfinder off St Abb’s Head. Hit with a single torpedo from U21, the explosion detonated the ship’s forward magazine and the ship broke in two. It sank so rapidly that only 29 crewmen survived.
Two weeks later, Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen further proved the U-boat’s offensive capabilities when his U9 torpedoed and sank three British cruisers HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue within less than one hour, killing 1,459 men. And he didn’t stop there: Weddigen sank the cruiser HMS Hawke on 15 October near Peterhead, with another 526 casualties. Alarmed at these sudden reversals and the U-boats’ unexpected revival, the Royal Navy was aghast at the penetration of their Scapa Flow anchorage in the Orkney Islands by
U18 in November. Though Kapitänleutnant Heinrich von Hennig’s boat was rammed and forced to scuttle while attempting to leave the anchorage, it was only the fact that the Grand Fleet was elsewhere in the North Sea that saved it from attack. Scapa Flow was temporarily abandoned.
The British respond
While Royal Navy morale had taken a savage blow, the concept of U-boats engaging in a war on commerce appears to have been dismissed by Allied naval leaders. U-boats were governed by existing Prize Law defined by an international treaty of which Germany was a signatory. Prize Law demanded that a merchant ship suspected of carrying contraband material be stopped and searched. If verified as belligerent, the crew
must be evacuated to a place of safety before the vessel was destroyed. The first merchant ship sunk by U-boat, on 20 October, was done so in accordance with these terms after Oberleutnant zur See Johannes Feldkirchner’s U17 stopped 866-ton British steamer SS Glitra 22km off the Norwegian coast and placed a prize crew aboard. Deeming the cargo of oil, coal and iron plate to be contraband, Feldkirchner ordered the crew to their lifeboats and his men opened the steamer’s seacocks, the lifeboats later towed towards the Norwegian coast and released in sight of land.
However, some predicted that submarines would be unable to stick to Prize Law, among them Britain’s former First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John ‘Jacky’ Fisher. Observing from his retirement the development of Germany’s U-boats, he had presented a report to the British cabinet predicting their likely dominance in 20th century naval warfare and a latent inability for sparsely crewed submarines to comply fully with prize warfare rules. Unable to spare crewmen to capture enemy ships and vulnerable to enemy fire when surfaced, he foresaw that submarines would soon be forced to abandon Prize Law. Furthermore, the arming of merchant ships, whether as ‘auxiliary cruisers’ or merely defensively, combined with instructions to report U-boat sightings or attempt to ram surfaced U-boats, removed treaty protection for those ships. Fisher’s report was dismissed, with the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill dispatching a note to him commending his “excellent” paper but noting that it had been “marred by the prominence” given to the concept of a U-boat commerce war. “I do not believe,” Churchill wrote, “this would ever be done by a civilised power.” At the outbreak of war Fisher was recalled to the post of First Sea Lord, but most in the Royal Navy still believed a U-boat war on commerce was the least probable development. A decisive clash between main battle fleets was still considered most likely.
Escalation and the Lusitania
Six days after Glitra’s sinking, U24 torpedoed without warning what Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Schneider believed to be a troopship, damaging French SS Amiral Ganteaume. The ship was carrying 2,500 Belgian refugees and although it didn’t sink and was towed to Boulogne, 40 people were killed in the panic onboard. Torpedo fragments were soon recovered and the British press subsequently made much of ‘German barbarity’, though the Admiralty opined (correctly) that the attack had likely been a case of mistaken identity.
Schneider’s attack also provoked controversy between naval leaders in Germany. While the German chancellor vociferously protested any further such incidents, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, Chief of the Admiralty Staff, firmly agreed with Bauer’s proposals to instigate a war on British mercantile shipping. Pohl’s opinion had been greatly influenced by British mining of the eastern entrance to the English Channel and its declaration on 2 November that the entire North Sea was a war zone, effectively blockading Germany with the resultant seizure or destruction of all cargoes ‘ultimately’ bound for Germany. U-boats were the key to a counterblockade, with the objective of starving Great Britain into submission as the war looked less and less likely to be ‘over by Christmas’.
By January 1915 Pohl had convinced Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz and the Imperial Admiralty Staff, by February the Chancellor. Subsequently, on 18 February Germany declared all waters around the British Isles and the English Channel a war zone in which all enemy ships would be destroyed and which neutrals should “navigate at their peril”. (The exception being a “free from attack” channel north of the Shetlands, near Norway and along the Dutch coast.)
Following strong American protests, U-boat commanders were instructed not to attack hospital ships and those ships firmly identified as neutral, complicating their rules of engagement. Between February and September 1915, Germany claimed its 30 operational U-boats sank 480 ships (327 by British records), aggregating just over 800,000-tons, with 15 U-boats lost within the same period. However, during the whole of 1915, 52 new U-boats entered service, and by the beginning of 1916 front line strength stood at 44.
Among those ships sunk was 30,396-ton Cunard liner RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by