CHAPTER 36
Between February and April 1917, the massacre of merchant shipping in the waters around the British Isles began in earnest and Admiral Holtz-endorff’s promise that Britain would be starved into surrender seemed on its way to realization. Holtzendorff had said that sinking 600,000 tons a month would suffice for the purpose. The February figure, 520,000 tons, approached Holtzendorff’s goal; the March figure, 564,000 tons, was closer still. In April, the figure soared above the German admiral’s most extravagant hope: 860,000 tons of shipping were destroyed. These losses, which included neutral ships, so intimidated many Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish captains that, in February alone, 600 neutral merchantmen in British ports refused to sail.
Three great trade routes brought goods and raw materials into Great Britain. One of these came up the Irish Sea from the southwest to Liverpool and Bristol; another lay around the north of Ireland, thence down to Liverpool; a third came into the Channel and up to Southampton and other Channel ports. The focal point for most of this trade lay in what the Royal Navy called the Western Approaches: the wide expanse of waters between Lands End, the Irish coast, and the Bay of Biscay. It was here that the U-boats were creating, in Churchill’s words, “a veritable cemetery of British shipping.” The agents responsible for filling this cemetery were about 130 U-boats, of which fewer than half were at sea at any given moment. By now, two and a half years into the war, early submarines like the one that had sunk Bacchan-te’s three sisters were antiques. The undersea craft now operating in the Western Approaches were 240 feet long, displaced 820 tons, and carried a 4.1-inch deck gun, six torpedo tubes, and sixteen torpedoes. They could remain at sea for four to six weeks. Submarines fitted as minelayers transported from thirty-six to forty-two mines. In addition, smaller U-boats 100 feet long with a surface speed of 8 knots, carrying two tubes and four torpedoes, were based in Flanders and operated in the Channel and the North Sea. These small submarines were prefabricated in Germany and brought in sections by rail to Bruges, in Belgium, where they were assembled; from Bruges, they traveled by canal to Zeebrugge and Ostend, and from there they put to sea.
Britain’s first lines of defense against these enemies were layers of mines and nets laid and strung across the Channel and in the German Bight. Once the submarines reached the high seas, the Royal Navy relied on surface ships, primarily destroyers, to defeat them. British destroyers, designed to attack enemy surface warships, could churn the water at 34 knots, far in excess of the 15 to 17 knots a surfaced submarine could make, but once submerged, the submarine was safe. A modern U-boat could travel as much as eighty miles under water before having to come up, and no destroyer—or sloop, trawler, or yacht pressed into service against the U-boats—could know where that would be.
Inability to attack a submerged enemy was only part of the problem involving British destroyers. Another complication was that there were too few of them. The British navy simply did not possess enough destroyers to screen the Grand Fleet, maintain the Harwich Force, secure the Channel crossings, and simultaneously protect merchant shipping from submarines. In April 1917, Britain had in commission about 260 destroyers, many old and badly worn after three years of service. The best 100 were assigned to the Grand Fleet, and no one wished to send the dreadnoughts into battle without their protective screen. Even so, in February 1917, Beatty reluctantly permitted eight destroyers to be borrowed from the Grand Fleet for antisubmarine work in southern waters. From every other station, the admirals or commodores in charge chorused that their flotillas could not be stripped without compromising their missions: the Harwich Force covered the southern North Sea and the Dutch coast; the Dover Patrol confronted thirty German U-boats and thirty destroyers based in Flanders; military expeditions in Greece and the Middle East required destroyers to guard their transports and supply ships. Nor was there much hope from new construction: Britain was producing destroyers at a rate of only four or five per month, a rate the shipyards said could not increase for many months.
Meanwhile, the U-boats were not only eating away the imported food stocks needed by Britain’s civilian population, they also were directly sapping the lifeblood of the Royal Navy itself. The fleet’s newest and most powerful dreadnoughts, its new light cruisers, and all of its destroyers burned fuel oil. The tankers bringing oil from Hampton Roads in America were large and slow, presenting fat, easy targets for submarines. So many tankers had been sunk that Britain’s reserve of fuel oil had dropped alarmingly; a six-month reserve had shrunk to a supply sufficient for only eight weeks. In consequence, the Admiralty had ordered Grand Fleet battle squadrons to cruise at no more than three-fifths speed except in case of emergency.
Jellicoe had come to the Admiralty to deal with the submarine menace, but once in office and seeing its dimensions, he was shaken. “The shipping situation is by far the most serious question of the day,” he wrote to Beatty at the end of December 1916. “I almost fear it is nearly too late to retrieve it. Drastic measures should have been taken months ago to stop unnecessary imports, ration the country and build ships. All is being started now, but it is nearly, if not quite, too late.” Late was better than never; the effort to build merchant ships faster than the enemy was sinking them was set in motion. Merchant vessel design was standardized and 35,000 skilled workers were recalled from army service and returned to the shipyards. To provide steel for new merchant ships, the Admiralty canceled orders for five new light cruisers and three giant battle cruisers. A dragnet was set to locate and purchase neutral ships. “The world’s ports were ransacked for tonnage. . . . Decrepit steamers fetched fabulous prices and even old sailing vessels, derelict or used as harbor hulks, were reconditioned and sent to sea again,” wrote Ernest Fayle, the official historian of the British merchant marine in the Great War. The result was an additional 1,163,000 tons brought into the merchant fleet in 1917. Unfortunately, this addition equaled only about one-quarter of Britain’s losses of 4.01 million tons of merchant shipping during that year.
Much of this work was done by ministries and departments other than the Admiralty; the navy’s task was to see that once these ships were built or reconditioned and sent to sea, they survived. On December 18, 1916, Jellicoe appointed Rear Admiral Alexander Duff as head of a new Anti-Submarine Division. Duff laid out new protected trade routes for merchantmen sailing independently to Britain, frequently changing these routes to confuse U-boat commanders. Destroyers and smaller craft were deployed to patrol these ocean highways. More mines were laid and more merchantmen were armed. Still the rate of shipping losses continued to mount. “The position is exceedingly grave,” Jellicoe wrote to the First Lord and the War Cabinet on February 21, 1917. Soon, he feared, the government would have “to determine how long we can continue to carry on the war if the losses of merchant shipping continue at the present rate.”
One approach to fighting the U-boats was guile, trickery, and ambush. Former merchant ships with Royal Navy crews and hidden guns were sent to sea, in the hope that their apparent innocence and vulnerability would lure submarines to their destruction. These vessels, which fought some of the most heroic actions of the war, were known variously as Special Service ships and mystery ships. Eventually the name that stuck was Q-ships.
To the eye, a Q-ship seemed merely one of the myriad small freighters, tramp steamers, motor drifters, even sailing vessels crossing the ocean on a hundred different courses with a thousand separate purposes. At first, honest ships this size were plums ripe for picking by German U-boat commanders. The submarine rose to the surface, allowed the crew and passengers to enter lifeboats, and then, hoarding their torpedoes for more important targets, placed time bombs in the victim’s hold. It did not take long, once the war against commercial shipping had begun, for the Admiralty to realize that this procedure—the U-boat abandoning the safety of the deep in order to approach the vessel it meant to sink—offered opportunity. No ship is more vulnerable than a submarine on the surface. The idea of tricking such deadly craft into presenting themselves in their condition of greatest jeopardy appealed to the inventive mind of Winston Churchill; not surprisingly, these dangerous theatricals were initiated during his administration of the Admiralty. But Churchill’s few Q-ships, fitted out in the winter of 1914–15, had no success: one never saw a submarine; another caught a single glimpse of a U-boat, which dived and disappeared. In May 1915, an even more ingenious bit of trickery was conjured up and sent to sea. A lonely trawler flying the British flag was sent out to move slowly across the ocean on seemingly innocent business. From its stern, however, two lines—one a tow cable, the other a telephone wire—dropped off the stern into the depths, where both were attached to a submerged British submarine. Should a U-boat take the bait, the fact would be communicated by telephone to the friendly submarine, which would cast off the tow and maneuver underwater into position to torpedo the U-boat. In June 1915, the British submarine C-24, cruising off Aberdeen in tow from the trawler Taranaki, torpedoed and sank U-40. On being brought aboard the trawler, the rescued U-boat captain bitterly complained that his boat had been sunk by a “dirty trick.” The following month, north of Scapa Flow, the submarine C-27, working with the trawler Princess Louise, torpedoed and sank U-23. By then, however, Churchill had left the Admiralty and the Q-ship–submarine tandem did not survive him long.
Nevertheless, the Q-ship concept itself survived and flourished. The idea that camouflage could lure a deadly, but fragile, submarine within range of a well-aimed 4-inch gun had a continuing, seductive attraction for the navy. The crews of the Q-ships, all volunteers, were naval officers and seamen who disguised themselves as civilians and learned to mimic the appearance and crisis behavior of a freighter’s crew. In the presence of a submarine, a “panic party”—some members of the Q-ship’s crew—would hurriedly abandon the ship, tumbling into lifeboats and rowing away. Those still on board would remain concealed, waiting for the submarine to surface and come within range of their hidden guns.
The concept was simple, but staging this deadly nautical theater required much delicate nuance. Q-ships were crowded, since half the men on board had to depart as the panic party when the ship was attacked. Thus, a merchant ship designed for six officers and twenty-six men now might carry eleven officers and sixty men. To deceive the captain of a surfaced U-boat staring intently through his binoculars across the water, or surveying his prey through his periscope, the Q-ship crew had to become actors. Stripped of their uniforms and clothed in rags picked up in dingy waterfront shops, they let their hair and beards grow long and their mustaches sprout and droop. One Royal Navy captain paced his Q-ship bridge wearing a long blond wig, which he thought made him look like a Dutch pilot. The regular navy’s scrupulous deference to rank was laid aside: no salutes were given or returned; seamen slouched and shuffled, kept their hands in their pockets and their pipes in their mouths. Garbage was dumped carelessly over the side—anathema in a man-of-war. Yet, despite their slovenly appearance, the discipline and readiness for action of a Q-ship crew was greater than that on the flagship of the Grand Fleet.
Most important, of course, was the concealment of the guns. Some were placed behind wooden bulwarks, which, at the pull of a lever, would instantly collapse, nakedly exposing the gun to the submarine and the submarine to the gun. Later, when U-boats became more cautious, they would sail submerged around the halted “merchant ship,” minutely scrutinizing its decks and sides, looking for signs such as seams or hinges in deck house bulwarks that might betray its true identity. In response, the guns were concealed in hatchways and covered by tarpaulins as if they were cargo. Sometimes guns were placed inside false lifeboats, which would suddenly fall away, giving the gun its freedom. Eventually, Q-ships carried hidden depth charges that could be rolled off the stern, and some were even equipped with submerged torpedo tubes.
The British could continue this kind of masquerade warfare only as long as the Germans delivered themselves into British hands; success, therefore, depended upon secrecy as to the existence, whereabouts, and tactics of mystery ships. Best for the British would be for the Germans to know only that some submarines did not return from sea—perhaps they had hit mines. But it was inevitable that eventually a Q-ship attack would fail and a surprised U-boat would survive to creep home and report what had happened. Once the secret was out, German newspapers described Q-ship warfare as “barbarous” and “contrary to the rules of civilized warfare.” Now, to the U-boats, every British or Allied merchant vessel became a possible Q-ship. Submarines could no longer board and place bombs on ships; they were forced to stay beyond the range of a freighter’s guns and sink by long-range gunfire, or remain beneath the surface and fire precious torpedoes. This was not what the U-boats wanted. And so the Q-ships improved their acting to convince their nervous prey that all was well, suspicions were groundless, and no peril lay in coming closer.
Q-ship duty was a unique blend of extreme danger and the dullest monotony. Back and forth through dangerous waters steamed the ships, hoping to meet a submarine. Success in this strange service could mean seeing the white bubbles of a torpedo approaching from the port or starboard beam. Sometimes when a torpedo struck, Q-ship men would be killed, but the ship itself was unlikely to sink quickly. This was the result of further guile: Q-ship cargo holds were crammed with wood or empty oil drums to provide the vessel with additional buoyancy.
Everything that happened from the moment a U-boat announced itself was designed to deceive the watching submarine captain. The panic party ran up and down the deck in apparent dismay and then scrambled into a lifeboat. Sometimes on lowering a boat, one end would deliberately be lowered too fast, spilling the men into the water. A seaman pretending to be the captain would be the last to board, carrying a bundle of “the ship’s papers.” The submarine might surface and make for these boats to collect the papers or take prisoners. Once U-boat captains became aware that they might be dealing with a Q-ship, the procedure changed. To satisfy himself, the captain would surface two or three miles away and shell the apparently abandoned merchant ship, calculating that if men had been left aboard, his shells would kill them. The Q-ship gun crews, stretched out on deck beside their guns, had to endure this bombardment without moving. Meanwhile, the Q-ship captain lay on his bridge, peeking through a hole in the canvas wall, waiting to use his voice tube to command his gunners. If the submarine was persuaded that the merchantman was abandoned, it would approach submerged to within a few hundred yards. The submarine captain would steer completely around the stricken vessel, using his periscope to study every detail. If something provoked doubt, the U-boat captain faced a decision. To surface so near a Q-ship meant the loss of his submarine. On the other hand, to leave a merchantman still afloat meant that it might be saved. If the U-boat captain decided to come up, the Q-ship captain would see the swirling water that signified a submarine was surfacing not far from the muzzles of his hidden guns. “Stand by,” he would whisper through the voice tube—then, at the top of his lungs, “Let go!” The White Ensign would soar up the halyard, the false bulwarks and lifeboats would collapse, and the guns would open fire. The submarine’s only chance was to submerge rapidly. Submariners were always ready to dive, even at the cost of losing those comrades on deck or in the conning tower who were unable to get below before the hatches closed. Often, however, before the boat could submerge, trained Q-boat gun crews could blow a dozen holes in its hull. When this happened, it was only minutes before the U-boat took its final plunge, leaving behind a heaving mixture of black oil, pieces of floating wood, and, sometimes, a few survivors.
From the beginning, the primary sphere of Q-ship operations was off the southwest coast of Ireland, where the U-boats concentrated their attacks on merchant shipping headed for the British Isles. In this region, early in the history of Q-ship operations, a dark stain was smeared across the otherwise bright pages of Allied mystery ship exploits. On August 19, 1915, 100 miles south of Queenstown, U-27 stopped the British steamer Nicosian with her cargo of munitions and 250 American mules destined for the British army in France. The freighter’s crew and passengers, including American mule drivers, had taken to the lifeboats and the submarine was about to sink the vessel when, from a distance, the British Q-ship Baralong, disguised as an American cargo vessel and flying the American flag, observed what was happening and hurried forward. The submarine at this early stage of the war accepted the Stars and Stripes as neutral and remained on the surface, permitting Baralong to approach. Steering carefully, Baralong’s captain managed to keep Nicosian between his ship and the U-boat so that the German captain never had a serious, long look at the oncoming Q-ship. When Baralong finally emerged from behind the deserted Nicosian, the range was only 600 yards. Thirty-five British shells quickly sank U-27, which left a dozen German survivors in the water swimming for the nearby Nicosian. Whereupon, Baralong’s captain, fearful—he said later—that if the swimmers were allowed to board the freighter, they would attempt to scuttle it, ordered the twelve Royal Marines on board his ship to open fire. Some of the swimmers, including the U-boat captain, were killed in the water; others were shot as they struggled up a rope ladder hanging from Nicosian’s side. Four German sailors managed to reach the deserted freighter’s deck and vanished. A party of marines followed them on board, hunted them down, and killed them. Whether this shooting was done in cold blood or whether the Germans were, in fact, caught trying to scuttle the ship was never known; the Admiralty immediately embargoed all news of the affair. Nevertheless, the appalled American mule drivers, who had watched from their lifeboats, eventually reached home and told the American press that the Germans had been murdered and that the false American colors, supposed to have been set aside before the Q-ship went into action, had never been replaced. Outraged, the German government demanded that Baralong’s crew be tried for murder. The Admiralty dismissed the demand, explaining that perhaps the Q-ship’s captain and crew had been on edge because eight British steamers were sunk that day on the Western Approaches, one of these being the 15,000-ton White Star liner Arabic, which Baralong had heard crying for help. The London press came up with the additional excuse that on that same day, two German destroyers had fired on the crew of a British submarine grounded on a Baltic sandbar, killing fourteen British sailors—although how this news might have reached and inflamedBaralong’s crew 700 miles away was left untold. The Baralong marine corporal who put a bullet into the head of the swimming German captain explained simply that, in his view, all Germans were “vermin.”
During the war, Q-ships sank twelve U-boats. A quarter of these were destroyed by Gordon Campbell. When the war began, this stocky, phlegmatic Englishman was a thirty-year-old lieutenant commander in charge of an old destroyer; no one would have picked him out as a future hero. But Campbell went to Q-ships, where his icy nerves and determination to sink submarines resulted, in the words of Rear Admiral William Sims, the senior American naval officer in Europe, in “some of the most admirable achievements in the whole history of naval warfare.” Jellicoe, normally laconic, went further: Campbell and his Q-ships, he said, had “a record of gallantry, endurance and discipline which has never been surpassed afloat or ashore.”
Gordon Campbell sailed on his first Q-ship for nine months before sighting a U-boat. He persevered, using the time to add inventive touches to his ship. Because some merchant ship masters took their wives to sea, Campbell dressed one of his men as a woman and positioned this figure in a chair on the bridge cradling a bundle to represent a baby. His first opponent was U-68, which he sank on March 22, 1916. The submarine signaled its presence by firing a torpedo, which missed. Campbell’s reaction was to take no apparent notice and continue his course and speed. “A tramp steamer,” he explained, describing his ship as he hoped the submarine captain had seen it, “could not be expected to know what a torpedo track looked like.” On deck, his crew continued to lounge about, smoking their pipes. Suddenly, the submarine surfaced astern and moved up the port side. Whereupon Campbell sank it.
After that, he had to wait almost another year. On February 17, 1917, Campbell’s Q-ship, Farnborough, steaming 100 miles southwest of Queens-town, was struck by a torpedo. Campbell was delighted; he had instructed his ship’s officers that “should the Officer of the Watch see a torpedo coming, he is to increase or decrease speed as necessary to ensure it hitting.” The panic party immediately abandoned ship. Campbell’s adversary, Captain Bruno Hoppe, in U-83, was an experienced commander; taking no chances, he remained submerged and conducted a lengthy periscope examination of his target. He first inspected the panic party in its lifeboat; his periscope came so close that one of the men in the lifeboat said to another, “Don’t speak so loud. He’ll hear you.” Then Hoppe circled Farnborough, coming so near that Campbell could see the submarine’s hull under the water. Apparently satisfied that the ship was harmless, Hoppe surfaced only 100 yards away. The moment he popped up in his conning tower, the first British shell arrived, decapitating him and dropping his headless body back down into the control room. U-83, punctured by forty-five shells, sank quickly, leaving two survivors. Fifteen members of Farnborough’s crew were decorated, including Campbell, who was awarded the Victoria Cross. The citation explaining the circumstances could not be made public and it became known as the mystery VC.
Campbell’s third and final triumph occurred on the morning of June 7, 1917, when his Q-ship Pargust was struck by a torpedo off the south coast of Ireland. By then, because U-boats were wary and less willing to rise to the surface, some decoy vessels had been fitted with torpedo tubes to use against submerged submarines. Pargust was one of these. By now, too, the panic party had further enhanced its dramatic performance: one of Campbell’s officers, playing the part of the ship’s captain, went over the side wearing a bowler hat and carrying a “pet parrot” (stuffed) in a green cage. For thirty minutes, the submarine minelayer UC-29 circled the ship, conducting a periscope reconnaissance. Campbell waited. When the submarine surfaced, it was fifty yards away. Campbell opened fire with his guns and fired his torpedo, which missed. The U-boat’s engine-room hatch opened and several men came on deck as if to surrender. Pargust ceased fire but when the U-boat started to move again, apparently attempting to escape, the Q-ship resumed firing. The German sailors on the submarine’s deck were swept off by a wave. More shots were fired and suddenly, the U-boat blew up—her own mines had exploded. After the action, when Campbell was asked to recommend honors for his men, he replied that he could not single out individuals; the crew’s bravery had been collective. Accordingly, the king bestowed two Victoria Crosses on the ship to be awarded to one officer and one seaman, chosen by a secret ballot of their peers.
The summer of 1917 marked the end of this dangerous game. In August 1917, six Q-ships were lost, and thereafter no German submarine was destroyed by a mystery ship. U-boat commanders were too suspicious to come close enough for Q-ship guns to reach them. The U-boats were now equipped with fourteen to sixteen torpedoes, so it was safer for U-boat captains to torpedo merchant ships without coming to the surface.
Before the end came, however, the most extraordinary of all Q-ship battles was fought. Not surprisingly, the captain of the British ship in this action was Gordon Campbell. On the morning of August 8, 1917, his 3,000-ton Q-ship Dunraven, disguised as an armed merchant vessel, was quietly plowing the Bay of Biscay, offering herself to submarine attack. Besides the small gun visible on her stern—appropriate to an armed merchantman—Dunraven also concealed four heavier guns, two underwater torpedo tubes, and four depth charges. About eleven o’clock, a surfaced U-boat appeared on the distant horizon, saw Dunraven, turned in her direction, and submerged. Campbell, playing the victim, began doing an occasional indifferent zigzag and ordered heavy funnel smoke as if he were attempting to escape; at the same time, he actually reduced speed to allow his enemy to close. Forty-five minutes later, U-61 rose from the sea less than two miles away and opened fire with her deck gun. When one of the shells landed in the water near the engine room, Campbell released a huge cloud of steam to suggest a boiler hit; this was a trick achieved with specially installed perforated pipes designed to release bursts of steam on the captain’s command. Dunraven, playing a distressed armed merchantman, returned the U-boat’s fire with her unconcealed stern gun, making certain that all shots missed. Meanwhile, on an open frequency the submarine could hear, the “merchant ship” radioed loudly for help.
At 12:25 p.m., when the U-boat was scarcely half a mile away, Campbell ordered, “Abandon ship.” Dunraven slowly turned broadside to the submarine so that the German captain could witness the theatrical pandemonium. The panic crew tumbled into the lifeboats, one of which was purposely mishandled in lowering and left behind hanging vertically from one of its davits. Encouraged, the captain of U-61 closed warily and continued firing. Suddenly, a shell hit Dunraven’s stern, landing amid a concentration of hidden guns, ammunition, depth charges, and men. A depth charge exploded, tossing the small after gun into the air. Two more German shells crashed into the stern, producing flames and clouds of black smoke. The magazine and the remaining depth charges all being in the stern, it was obvious to Campbell that a larger explosion was coming. The crew of the secret 4-inch gun placed immediately above the magazine also knew the danger but remained motionless. U-61 passed around the stern from port to starboard less than 500 yards away, but the black smoke pouring from the Q-ship’s burning stern made it impossible for the British gunners to aim. In two minutes, the U-boat would be absolutely clear, presenting a perfect target. Campbell had to choose between opening fire under difficult conditions or leaving his men immobile in grave danger until the submarine was in the clear. As Campbell saw it, it was his duty and that of his crew to wait. He waited. They waited.
As U-61 was passing close astern of Dunraven, two depth charges blew up in what even the stolid Campbell described as “a terrific explosion.” The concealed 4-inch gun and its gun crew were hurled along the deck, along with many unexploded shells. Remarkably, the men all lived. The U-boat, warned by the size of the explosion that it was confronting a Q-ship, performed a crash-dive and disappeared. Campbell now knew that soon he would be torpedoed. Still, with his ship crippled and stationary, the after deck a mass of flames, the magazine not yet exploded, and a torpedo certain, Campbell, intent on sinking his enemy, radioed all potential assistance to keep away.
At 1:20 p.m., a torpedo struck Dunraven’s starboard side. The ruse of merchant seamen abandoning ship had already been exhausted. But a roaring fire now engulfed the greater part of the vessel and there is a moment when even a Q-ship must be abandoned. Hoping that the German captain would believe that this moment had arrived, Campbell gave the order “Abandon ship” for the second time. A second panic party, organized impromptu, went over the side into rafts. Still, twenty-three men remained on board: the gun crews of the two working guns still concealed, the men at the two torpedo tubes, the ship’s doctor, nine wounded men, and four men lying prone on the bridge. One of them was Campbell.
U-61 rose to the surface. Was the burning ship finally abandoned or not? Uncertain, the submarine fired a few more shells into the wreck and then submerged. For forty-five minutes, showing only its periscope, the U-boat circled its listing, burning victim. During this time, the fire on Dunraven grew larger and boxes of gunpowder and 4-inch shells began exploding in the flames. At 2:30 p.m., the U-boat surfaced a few hundred yards directly astern of the Q-ship, where no gun could bear on her. For twenty minutes, more shells were fired into the stricken ship. The men on board remained motionless.
At 2:50 p.m., U-61 ceased fire, submerged, and moved past Dunraven’s port side at a distance of only 150 yards. Campbell, his ship burning and sinking, decided to wait no longer. Only a small part of the submarine’s periscope was visible but it was enough to reveal depth and position. At 2:55 p.m., he fired a torpedo. Unfortunately, his ship was listing and his aim was spoiled. The bubbles passed just ahead of the periscope and the U-boat, unaware, came slowly around to the starboard side. Given a second chance, Campbell fired his second torpedo. This time, he and others heard a metallic clang: the torpedo had made contact, but had failed to explode. The submarine captain heard the same thing and promptly dived deep, gave up the battle, and returned to Germany. Campbell now genuinely signaled for help and an American armed yacht and two British destroyers arrived to rescue his crew. Dunraven was taken in tow, but that night, her White Ensign flying, she foundered. Two members of her crew, a lieutenant and a petty officer, were awarded the Victoria Cross. Gordon Campbell, in lieu of a second Victoria Cross, was given a bar to his first. This, along with his Distinguished Service Order with two bars, made him the most highly decorated man in the Royal Navy during the Great War.
By the time of Dunraven’s epic battle, help was coming from America. At the end of March 1917, Rear Admiral William S. Sims, the president of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, was ordered to report immediately and secretly to Washington. He was not to appear at the Navy Department, but to contact his superiors by telephone. In this manner, Sims learned that United States probably would soon be at war with Germany and that he was to leave at once for England, where he was to coordinate American cooperation with the Royal Navy. Sims sailed for England as “Mr. S. W. Davidson,” wearing civilian clothes and carrying no uniform in his luggage. His American steamship struck a mine as it approached Liverpool; the passengers were transferred to another vessel and reached England safely on April 9. There, “Mr. Davidson” was met by a special train and hurried to London. By then, his alias was unnecessary; three days earlier, Congress had declared war on Germany.
William Sims, a tall, erect, white-haired man born in Canada, became an American, entered the navy, and made his name as a gunnery specialist. He had been Inspector of Target Practice and had commanded the battleship Minnesota and then a flotilla of destroyers before going to the War College. The obvious reason for sending Sims to Britain was that five years earlier he had made a speech in London that at the time seemed likely to blight his career. At the Guildhall in 1910, then Captain Sims had promised the Lord Mayor and a large audience that in the event of a war with Germany, Britain could “rely upon the last ship, the last dollar, the last man, and the last drop of blood of her kindred beyond the sea.” For this bit of unauthorized, public Anglophilia, Sims had received a direct reprimand from President Taft. Now, however, when a senior officer was needed to coordinate planning with the British navy, Sims’s enthusiasm was remembered favorably. Not all American officers shared his views. Before Sims left Washington, the navy’s senior admiral, William S. Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, admonished him, “Don’t let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It’s none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans.”
In London, Sims found the British public largely oblivious to the danger facing their country. The government had ceased to publish figures for tonnages sunk and the crowds packing the theaters every night were cheerfully ignorant of the fact that only six weeks’ supply of wheat remained in the country. The truth was that the Germans had discovered a way to win the war and were on their way to accomplishing it. Unless the appalling destruction of merchant tonnage could be substantially checked, Britain’s withdrawal from the war was not far off.
On the morning of April 10, Sims called on Jellicoe at the Admiralty. The two men were friends; they had met in China in 1901 and had kept in touch because of their mutual interest in naval gunnery. Sims greatly admired the British admiral. The First Sea Lord, he said, was “a small man, powerful in frame . . . indefatigable . . . profound . . . simple and direct . . . the idol of the officers and men of the Grand Fleet. . . . Success made him more quiet, soft spoken and dignified. . . . He was all courtesy, all brain . . . approachable, frank, open-minded.” And Jellicoe’s “smooth-shaven face when I met him that morning was, as usual, calm, smiling imperturbable.”
Greeting his visitor, Jellicoe took a paper out of his drawer and handed it across the table. It was a record of the tonnage of British and neutral shipping losses of the last few months.
“I was fairly astounded,” Sims wrote later,
for I had never imagined anything so terrible. I expressed my consternation to Admiral Jellicoe.
“Yes,” he said, as quietly as though he were discussing the weather and not the future of the British Empire. “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.
“Everything that we can. We are increasing our anti-submarine forces in every possible way. We are using every possible craft we can with which to fight submarines. We are building destroyers, trawlers and other like craft as fast as we can. But the situation is very serious and we shall need all the assistance we can get.”
“It looks as though the Germans are winning the war,” I remarked.
“They will win unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon,” the Admiral replied.
“Is there no solution for the problem?” I asked.
“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe announced.
Bad as it was, Jellicoe expected the situation to get worse. Summer was coming, which would give the submarines more daylight and milder weather. Jellicoe could calculate and apply the arithmetic as well as Holtzendorff could; it was relatively easy to determine how long the Allies could last. What the figures said was that, unless something could be done quickly, the end would come about November 1.
Jellicoe was not alone in his alarm. King George V invited Sims to spend a night at Windsor Castle and after dinner, over cigars, told him that the sinkings must be stopped or the Allies would lose the war. Only the prime minister remained optimistic. Lloyd George—“a big, exuberant boy,” as Sims described him—was “always laughing and joking, constantly indulging in repartee and by-play. His face never betrayed the slightest anxiety. ‘Oh, yes, things are bad,’ he would say with a smile and a sweep of his hand. ‘But we shall get the best of the submarines—never fear!’ ”
Sims told Jellicoe that no one in the United States realized that the situation was so serious and asked how America could help. The greatest need, Jellicoe stressed, was for “every available destroyer, trawler, yacht, tug and other small craft of sufficient speed to deal with submarines.” He asked that America build more merchant ships to replace the losses. He also suggested that the United States might repair and put into service all German liners and cargo ships interned in American ports. Sims, listening to Jellicoe, immediately grasped the implications for the United States. If Britain and France were forced to surrender, the peace terms would include the surrender of the British and French fleets. The U.S. Navy would then be left alone to fight a German-British-French armada.
Simms cabled Washington, describing for men separated from the war by 3,000 miles the gravity of the submarine crisis. The best way for the United States to help immediately, he said, was by sending destroyers and light surface craft to serve in the waters west of Ireland along which lay the shipping routes that meant life or death to the Allied cause. Ambassador Page wholeheartedly supported Sims and personally asked President Wilson to send thirty destroyers. On April 13, Sims was told that six U.S. destroyers were coming immediately, with more to follow. On April 14, Destroyer Divi-sion 8 of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, based in York River, Virginia, departed for Boston to fit out for “long and distant service.”
For the first thirty-two months of war, British and Allied merchantmen had sailed independently, setting their own courses and speeds, conforming vaguely to a system of advisory routing established by the Admiralty, but taking their chances on encountering submarines. Safety was seen to lie in large numbers of merchant vessels widely dispersed, in the cloak of night and storms, in equipping some merchantmen with deck guns, in occasional zigzagging, and, most important, in luck. As late as January 1917, an Admiralty memorandum specifically reiterated this policy and condemned any other: “Wherever possible, vessels should sail singly. . . . The system of several ships sailing in company as a convoy is not recommended in any area where submarine attack is a possibility. . . . It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully.” “A submarine could remain at a distance and fire her torpedo into the middle of the convoy with every chance of success.”
By April 1917, the ferocity of the U-boat offensive had torn these assumptions to shreds. The new solution, reluctantly accepted by the Admiralty, was the convoy system it had just condemned. Ironically, the British navy had already had substantial success with convoy. Grand Fleet battle squadrons, escorted by destroyers, steamed in close formation through waters infested with U-boats—and no dreadnought had ever been sunk by a submarine. In effect, the dreadnoughts were under convoy. Troop transports were convoyed to the Mediterranean and Gallipoli. Closer to home, the British navy successfully convoyed troops and supplies across the Channel to France every day without ever losing a man, a gun, or a horse. In addi-tion, ships carrying coal to France were now under convoy. Coal was a major British export, essential to the economy and war production of her allies, France and Italy, as well as to the economy of neutral Norway. France alone needed to import 1.5 million tons of coal every month and cross-Channel colliers made 800 round-trips a month. In February, four convoys—which the Admiralty preferred to call controlled sailings—sailed every day under escort by armed trawlers. Between February 10, when the first convoy sailed, and the end of April, 2,600 convoyed crossings went back and forth to France and only 5 colliers were sunk; the rate of loss was 0.19 percent. From February through August, 8,900 ships were convoyed; 16 were sunk, a rate of 0.18 percent. On April 4, the decision had been made to place Scandinavian trade—British coal to Scandinavia; Scandinavian metal ores, nitrates, wood, and foodstuffs to Britain—under convoy. In the first month of this arrangement, the rate of shipping losses plummeted from 25 percent to 0.24 percent.
Why, then, did the Admiralty wait so long before extending the convoy system to the larger arena of the Western Approaches? Jellicoe’s answer, in large part, was the lack of destroyers. When Sims asked whether convoys might work in this critical area, Jellicoe said the number of escorts available was “totally insufficient.” It was to make up this dearth that the First Sea Lord had pressed Sims, and Sims, in turn, had pressed the Navy Department to send American destroyers to Europe. But the Admiralty had other reasons for wariness. Naval officers doubted the ability of merchant vessels steaming in columns to keep close and accurate station, especially at night; merchantmen, the navy felt, would not be able to follow signals and zigzag in unison; they varied in speed and tended to straggle, a difficulty that could be overcome only by reducing the speed of convoy to that of the slowest ship. Further, the simultaneous arrival of a large number of ships would badly congest harbors and dock facilities, thereby slowing the rate and diminishing the volume of goods imported.
The Admiralty’s hesitations were matched by those of the weatherbeaten, practical men who captained British merchantmen. On February 23, 1917, three weeks after the unrestricted submarine campaign began and eleven days before America entered the war, Jellicoe invited ten captains of cargo steamers then lying in the London docks to call on him at the Admiralty. There, the First Sea Lord asked for their views on the feasibility of placing ships in convoy as protection against U-boats. He emphasized the necessity of good station keeping in close formation; ideally, vessels should travel in lines only 500 yards apart. “Absolutely impossible,” the ten captains replied in chorus. “We have so few competent deck officers that the captain would have to be on the bridge the whole twenty-four hours.” Also, they lacked suitable engine-room telegraphs with which fine-tune speed; their inexperienced engineers could not make the delicate adjustments required; the poor quality of coal they burned delivered varying power to the propellers, making impossible the constant slight variations in speed required to keep station. In general, their ships were undermanned and the personnel were inexperienced. They could not maneuver at night or in fogs and gales in close formation without lights. They were certain they would lose more ships to collision than submarines could sink. Emphatically, the captains declared that they did not want convoys; they would rather sail alone and take their chances.
This meeting at the Admiralty had taken place near the end of February. Between then and the end of April, the situation became much worse: within three months, almost 2 million tons of the world’s merchant shipping had been sent to the bottom. Meanwhile, in the same three months, Britain had sunk only seven submarines. These grim facts were forcing the Admiralty to reconsider beginning Atlantic convoys. Duff was already monitoring the results of the coal convoys to France and Jellicoe had approved institution of convoys to Scandinavia. The obstacle to extending convoy to the Western Approaches remained the lack of escorts. Jellicoe was heavily criticized for his tardiness in authorizing ocean convoy, but for him, it was a matter of drawing conclusions from technical data; he neither pushed nor opposed convoy purely on principle. His nature was to be cautious in a new situation. Jellicoe could make a quick decision—he had done so in deploying the fleet at Jutland—but he had not done so then, and would not do so now, until he possessed all the obtainable information. This was Jellicoe’s way.
Lloyd George’s way was different. Watching the shipping losses soar, he roared with anger and poured contempt on the “palsied and muddle-headed Admiralty” with its “atmosphere of crouching nervousness,” its “condition of utter despair,” and its “paralytic documents.” He had looked, he announced, into the “fear-dimmed eyes of our Mall admirals” and seen only “stunned pessimism.” The “High Admirals” were “men whose caution exceeded their courage,” who “go about with gloomy mien and despondent hearts,” whose “reports are full of despair.” During the last week of April, the prime minister staged a drama—or so he later claimed. On April 23, he raised in the War Cabinet the question of shipping losses and the possibility of convoy. Jellicoe, who was present, said that convoy was under consideration; that the obstacle was the shortage of destroyers; that American destroyers had been promised but none had yet arrived. That night at the Admiralty, Duff came to Jellicoe’s office and told him that the shipping losses had convinced him that a wider system of convoy must be attempted. Jellicoe asked Duff to draw up a minute putting this recommendation in specific detail. On April 25, the War Cabinet met and again discussed the submarine crisis. According to Lord Beaverbrook, who was not there, Lloyd George “announced his intent to go himself to the Admiralty and make peremptory decisions.” The visit was set for April 30. On April 26, Duff produced his minute for Jellicoe, and on April 27 the First Sea Lord approved the recommendations and authorized an experimental convoy from Gibraltar to the Channel. As a result, when Lloyd George arrived at the Admiralty three days later, Jellicoe told the prime minister that a convoy system was under trial. According to Hankey, who was present, Lloyd George was pleased “and spent the whole day there very pleasantly, lunching with Admiral Jellicoe and his wife and four little girls—Lloyd George having a great flirtation with a little girl of three.” Beaverbrook’s version—again, he was not there—was, “On the 30th of April, the prime minister descended on the Admiralty, seated himself in the First Lord’s chair, and took over the full reins.”
Seventeen years later, Lloyd George announced in his War Memoirs that he was responsible for the decision to adopt convoy. “Apparently the prospect of being overruled in their own sanctuary galvanised the Admiralty. Accordingly, when I arrived at the Admiralty, I found the Board in a chastened mood. . . . I insisted on their giving a trial to the Gibraltar convoy.” Professor A. T. Patterson, Jellicoe’s biographer and the editor of his letters, labels Lloyd George’s account “a travesty of the facts.” Duff’s minute was of sufficient length and detail, says Patterson, as to “virtually preclude the possibility of its having been thrown together in a few hours” following the prime minister’s announcement of his intended visit. In 1928, Duff wrote to Jellicoe and stated emphatically that his own convoy proposal to Jellicoe had been influenced only by the mounting shipping losses: “My impression was that he [Lloyd George] came to look into Admiralty organization generally. There is no foundation for the belief that his visit was in any way the cause of my suggestion that the time had arrived for starting convoy.” Jellicoe himself later wrote that any statement that his approval of Duff’s minute and the decision to begin trial convoys “was the result of pressure brought to bear on the Admiralty from the War Cabinet is quite incorrect. The views of experienced naval officers on a technical question involving the gravest responsibility could not possibly be affected by outside opinion, however high the quarter from which that opinion emanated.” Sir Edward Carson, who was First Lord at the time, read Lloyd George’s claim in the former prime minister’s War Memoirs with indignation. “The little popinjay,” he said of Lloyd George, had told “the biggest lie ever was told! Jellicoe did not oppose the convoy system but required time to organize it. At first there were not enough ships available for that work. But the prime minister would not listen to reason. ‘Sack the lot!’ was his favorite expression. ‘Why don’t you get fresh men with sea experience?’ One day I said to him, ‘I must be under a strange hallucination, Prime Minister, for I thought that Admiral Jellicoe had just come from the sea.’ ”
[Lloyd George’s language and behavior in this episode were wholly characteristic of this unusual, often unruly Welshman. In Parliament and in the country, he delivered speeches that were “something between incomparable drama and a high class vaudeville act,” wrote the historian George Dangerfield. Buttressed by a towering ego, an unwillingness to lose any battle, and a refusal to accept that his success often came at high cost to others, Lloyd George had shouldered his way to the highest position in British politics. But the new prime minister had a dark side; no one saw this more clearly than his eldest son, Richard.
“My father,” explained Richard Lloyd George, “once under the spell of the exercise of his own charm, whether it concerned an audience at a public meeting or consisted of one person, became completely carried away, without any other idea in his head, without a thought of consequences. . . . My father was probably the greatest natural Don Juan in the history of British politics. . . . His entire life, including fifty-three years of marriage to my mother, was involved with a series of affairs with women. . . . My father’s chief safeguard in these affairs was that he was almost never seriously involved emotionally. . . . He had no sense of loyalty to his mistresses, and could present a bold, indignant front, with flat protestations that he was being ‘victimised by these vainglorious harpies who wanted to boast of their conquest of me.’. . . There was almost never any continuing association, so that at any particular time he could declare without fear of contradiction, ‘Hardly know the woman. Haven’t seen her for months and not the least intention of seeing her again.’
“To portray his life without taking into account this side of his personality,” the son concludes, “is like failing to depict Beethoven’s handicap of deafness during the composition of his greatest works.”]
On May 10, sixteen merchant vessels, sailing in three columns and escorted by two armed merchantmen and three armed yachts, departed Gibraltar for England, traveling at 6½ knots. Eight days later, the convoy was met at the outer edge of the submarine danger zone by six destroyers from Devonport, and on May 20 the sixteen merchantmen reached Plymouth unharmed. No U-boats had been encountered and, equally important, the merchant captains had found that they could keep station, obey signals, and zigzag in unison, and furthermore that they “had enjoyed more sleep than they had had for months.” This success led to another experimental convoy, this time across the North Atlantic. On May 24, twelve merchant ships left Hampton Roads for Britain, traveling at 9 knots. They were escorted most of the way by the cruiser Roxburgh and, on reaching the danger zone, were met by eight destroyers. Two slow steamers straggled and dropped out; one of these was torpedoed. The remaining ships arrived safely on June 7. Despite fog and heavy weather, the navy reported that their station keeping had been excellent.
The success of these two trial convoys encouraged the Admiralty to expand the effort. In June, sixty-four merchant vessels, gathered in four convoys, were escorted from Hampton Roads to Britain. Assembling safely and receiving instructions inside American harbors rather than in the open sea, North Atlantic convoys began running every fourth day. By the end of July, twenty-one convoys made up of 354 ships had crossed the Atlantic; of the convoyed ships, submarines sank two. This plunge in shipping losses demolished the “too many eggs in one basket” objection to convoy. In the first place, the presence of convoy escorts eliminated the threat of attack by gunfire and forced U-boats to use torpedoes. And to make an underwater attack now became more difficult: the submarine commander had to come within range—the ideal was about 700 yards—while somehow eluding the escorts. Against ships sailing independently, the U-boat had generally been able to maneuver into position, fire a torpedo, watch his victim sink, and then lookaround for his next target. With a convoy, the whole mass of ships swept by together and was gone. Essentially, as Sims graphically described it, convoy was managing to “establish a square mile of the surface of the ocean in which submarines could not operate and then move that square along until port was reached.”
Often, the U-boats never saw the convoy or its escorts. “The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance,” Winston Churchill later wrote. “There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one.” This phenomenon was also noted by Karl Doenitz, a U-boat commander who became the commander of German submarines, the Commander-in-Chief of the German navy, and the last führer of the Third Reich in World War II. Of the effect of convoy in the Great War, he wrote:
The oceans at once became bare and empty. For long periods at a time, the U-boats, operating individually, would see nothing at all; and then suddenly up would loom a huge concourse of ships, thirty or fifty or more of them, surrounded by a strong escort of warships of all types. The solitary U-boat, which most probably had sighted the convoy purely by chance, would then attack, thrusting again and again . . . for perhaps several days and nights until the physical exhaustion of the commander and crew called a halt. The lone U-boat might well sink one or two ships, or even several, but that was a poor percentage of the whole. The convoy would steam on. In most cases, no other German U-boat would catch sight of it and it would reach Britain, bringing a rich cargo of foodstuffs and raw materials safely to port.
The success of convoy forced naval officers fighting submarines to shift their thinking. Trained in the Royal Navy’s tradition of offensive warfare, they had previously considered convoy to be a defensive tactic in which warships handed the initiative to the enemy and then plodded along beside merchant ships awaiting attack. Most officers preferred aggressive hunting for submarines. Reality turned these tactics upside down. Convoy, it turned out, concentrated surface naval forces where the submerged enemy was bound to come if he wished to do harm. The inviting presence of so many targets drew U-boats to a place where the antisubmarine craft could get at them and kill them. To make convoy work, however, there had to be sufficient escort ships. Where would Britain find them?
On Friday, May 4, 1917, six modern, four-stacker U.S. Navy destroyers entered the Irish harbor of Queenstown. The morning was brilliant, with the sun sparkling on smooth water and shining on the green hills rising behind the town. Ships in the harbor welcomed the newcomers by flying the American flag from a forest of masts. In the town, the Stars and Stripes floated from public buildings and private houses. Along the shore, thousands of people cheered and waved. Watching the American warships come in, British seamen noticed that they were longer and larger than British destroyers, qualities that would give them greater endurance and radius of action on the Western Approaches. The American commander was Joseph K. Taussig, who in 1900, as a twenty-one-year-old midshipman, had been wounded near Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion campaign. Recovering, Taussig found himself lying on a cot next to a forty-year-old Royal Navy captain named John Jellicoe who had been more severely wounded the same day. Seventeen years later, when Taussig came ashore in Queenstown, the First Sea Lord welcomed him in the name of “the British nation and the British Admiralty and [with] every possible good wish from myself. We shall all have our work cut out to subdue piracy.”
Taussig was also welcomed by Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, the British Commander-in-Chief in Queenstown, who was to have operational control of dozens of American destroyers over the next eighteen months. The first six American destroyer captains were invited to dinner at Admiralty House the night they arrived. “Dine in undress; no speeches,” said Bayly’s in-vitation, and four of the six were asked to sleep over, “to get a good rest.” Taussig and his fellow Americans walked up the steep hill to Admiralty House overlooking the harbor and found at the top an unsmiling man with a weatherbeaten face and iron-gray hair, standing in a worn uniform with his hands behind his back. He shook hands, then turned to Taussig and asked, “When will you be ready to go to sea?”
“We are ready now, sir, as soon as we finish refueling,” Taussig said.
“I will give you four days from time of arrival. Will that be sufficient?”
On May 17, six more American destroyers arrived at Queenstown; another six came a week later. These and all subsequent American vessels arriving in Queenstown were placed under Bayly’s command because Sims had convinced his superiors in Washington that American warships in Europe—and the U.S. Navy as a whole—should be used as a reinforcement pool for the hard-pressed Allied navies. Sims rejected—and convinced his superiors in Washington to reject—any thought of attempting to operate an independent American fleet in Europe. The result was a remarkable suspension of national and service pride by the U.S. Navy to further the effort of winning the war. In this scheme, Bayly played his role to perfection. Soon after American destroyers arrived in Queenstown, most of Bayly’s British destroyers were transferred to the Channel and the North Sea, leaving the British admiral in command of a mostly American force. “He watched over our ships and their men with the jealous eye of a father,” said Sims. “He always referred to ‘my destroyers’ and ‘my Americans’ and woe to anyone who attempted to interfere with them. Once or twice a dispute arose between an American destroyer commander and a British; in such cases Admiral Bayly vigorously took the part of the American. ‘You did perfectly right,’ he would say to our men and then turn all his guns against the interfering Britisher.” Bayly’s effort to create an international force succeeded; American officers called him Uncle Lewis—sometimes to his face—and some brought him their personal problems. Bayly was a widower and his hostess was his Australian niece, Violet Voysey, who poured tea, presided over dinners, listened for hours, and made the Americans feel that Admiralty House was their temporary home.
Beyond this, a strong personal tie developed between Bayly and Sims. This had not been widely predicted. Bayly was a stern, hard-driving disciplinarian who, said one officer, “attributed his success to working a minimum of eleven hours a day on six days a week, never smoking before 10 p.m., walking at least twenty miles on Sunday, playing tennis for an hour at 6:30 a.m. on fine mornings and running around Greenwich Park at 5:30 p.m.” He had few friends. Writing Taussig before the first American destroyers arrived, Sims had warned that Bayly was said to be “a peculiarly difficult man to deal with.” Sims had met Bayly at the Admiralty, “and when I was introduced to him he was very rude as he was also to some very high Admiralty officials present. It was evidently one of Admiral Bayly’s bad days.” Soon afterward, Bayly had a good day. “I do not consider that I am in charge of two different kinds of destroyers,” he wrote to Sims one week after Taussig arrived. “We are all one here. I have told the captains of your destroyers, as I tell ours, that the way to prevent misunderstandings and doubts is to come and see me. . . . I am always here and my business is to help them. Should you come here, please come to Admiralty House. I do not entertain but can make you comfortable.” Three weeks later, Sims received an even more unexpected letter: “I have a suggestion,” wrote Bayly. “If I should go on leave for 18 to 23 June, would you like to run the show in my absence? I should like it and you are the only man of whom I could truthfully say that. Your fellows would like it and it would have a good effect all around. . . . And if the Admiralty during my absence ‘regret that you should have,’ etc., I will take the blame. If they give you a DSO, keep it.” Sims was delighted, Jellicoe approved, and on June 18, 1917, the dark blue flag of an American admiral ran up in front of Admiralty House in Queenstown. For five days, Sims was Commander-in-Chief of all British and American naval forces operating on the coast of Ireland.
By the end of June, Bayly commanded twenty-eight American destroyers; by July 5, thirty-four; by the end of July, thirty-seven. Ultimately, 8,000 American seamen were based at Queenstown; when the war ended, there were seventy-nine American destroyers in European waters—at Queens-town, Brest, and Gibraltar. Of these, only one was lost to enemy action. This was Jacob Jones, sunk by a torpedo from U-53. This submarine’s captain was the celebrated Hans Rose, whose unexpected visit in October 1916 had astonished the citizens of Newport, Rhode Island. In May 1918, on the anniversary of the arrival of the first American destroyers in Queenstown, Bayly issued a memorandum to all U.S. naval forces under his command: “To command you is an honor, to work with you is a pleasure, and to know you is to know the best traits of the Anglo-Saxon race.”
No matter how many American destroyers arrived in Europe, submerged U-boats could not be destroyed until new weapons were developed. One of these was the hydrophone, a listening device designed to pick up the propeller sounds of a submarine underwater. In 1915, an early version of this instrument was able, under optimum conditions, to pick up submerged U-boats two miles away. But the hydrophone was useless when operated aboard a moving ship; the noise of the vessel’s own machinery and of water passing along the vessel’s hull drowned out the sounds made by a U-boat propeller. And if the hunting vessel stopped to listen in silence, it became an easy target for a torpedo. As work continued, hydrophones improved. Meanwhile, however, even when a submerged submarine was pinpointed, surface vessels had no weapon to destroy it. Often, British seamen had looked down to see the long, gray cigar shape of a submerged U-boat moving beneath them and been able to do nothing. Their frustrations were addressed in 1916, when the first depth charges came aboard their ships. A metal can or barrel containing 300 pounds of TNT and rolled off the stern of a destroyer, this weapon was detonated by a pressure fuse set for a specific depth. A thousand Type D depth charges were ordered in August 1916, and on December 13, 1916, the first U-boat perished in this terrible way. Production of depth charges was slow: early in 1917 the normal allotment to an Allied antisubmarine vessel was two. By early 1918, however, most antisubmarine craft were equipped with thirty-five to forty depth charges, and in the last ten months of the war, nineteen U-boats were sunk by depth-charge attack.
The horror of dying this way can only be imagined. Sims described such an attack as seen from the surface: “First, the depth charge exploded, causing a mushroom of water. . . . Immediately afterward, a secondary explosion was heard; this was a horrible and muffled sound coming from the deep, more powerful and more terrible than any that could have been caused by the destroyer’s ‘ash can.’ An enormous volcano of water and all kinds of debris arose from the sea. . . . As soon as the water subsided, great masses of heavy black oil began rising to the surface and completely splintered wood and other debris appeared.” In this case, death came quickly, but sometimes the end was prolonged. Sims also described a U-boat, located by hydrophones and heavily depth-charged, which then fell silent beneath the waves. “Then a propeller was heard faintly turning or attempting to turn . . . a slight grating or squeaking such as might have been made by damaged machinery. This noise lasted a few seconds and then stopped. Presently it started up again and then once more it stopped. The submarine was making a little progress, but fitfully; she would go a few yards and then pause.” The surface vessels dropped more depth charges and listened again. “There was a lumbering noise such as might be made by a heavy object trying to drag its hulk along the muddy bottom; this was followed by silence, showing that the wounded vessel could advance only a few yards.” By now, the surface vessels had used all of their depth charges and could only wait. “All night long, the listeners reported scraping and straining noises from below but these grew fainter and fainter.” They listened for hours and then, the following afternoon, heard “a sharp, piercing noise. . . . Only one thing in the world could make a sound like that . . . the crack of a revolver.” More of these pistol cracks followed, counted by the listeners above. “In all, twenty-five shots came from the bottom of the sea.” Then, silence.
Neither convoy nor depth charges made a difference quickly. In May 1917, shipping losses dropped to 616,000 tons, a dramatic decline from the slaughter of April, but this was due neither to the commencement of ocean convoy nor to the arrival of American warships; neither had yet had time to take effect. Losses declined because the U-boat fleet simply could not maintain the tremendous effort it had made in April. But the prospect before the German Naval Staff continued bright. In May, only two U-boats were sunk, while eight new U-boats were commissioned. Meanwhile, the British Admiralty desperately strained to find destroyers. On May 7, three days after the first American ships anchored at Queenstown, Beatty wrote to Jellicoe, “We have thirty-seven destroyers at Scapa and fourteen at Rosyth.” In June, Beatty calculated that if the Grand Fleet were forced to put to sea, it might have only forty—instead of a hundred—destroyers available for a fleet action. Also in June, the submarines got a second wind: shipping losses rose to 696,000 tons. And then the tide gradually began to turn. In July, 555,000 tons were sunk; in August, the figure was 472,000 tons. The average was over half a million tons a month, but Admiral Holtzendorff’s late summer harvest deadline for Britain’s surrender was passing and Britain remained steadfastly in the war. In September, shipping losses dropped to 353,000 tons, and ten submarines were lost. That same month, eighty-three convoys crossed the Atlantic. In October, shipping losses rose to 466,000 tons, but they fell in November to 302,000 tons. By the end of that month, 90 percent of British ocean shipping was under convoy. Even though losses mounted again in December, to 414,000 tons, the worst was over. From January through April, monthly losses of merchant shipping averaged 325,000 tons; from May to the end of the war, about 230,000 tons. During the last year of the war, 92 percent of Allied shipping sailed in convoy; the loss rate in the convoys was less than .5 percent.
For the German navy, the loss curve had been in the opposite direction. Between May and July 1917, fifteen U-boats were lost, but the ratio remained favorable: fifty-three merchant ships were sunk for each U-boat lost. Moreover, twenty-four new U-boats replaced the fifteen lost. Even so, the German High Command now understood that the unrestricted campaign was not going to bring Britain to her knees within six months. Rather than give up, the Naval Staff extended its time limit. In early July, ninety-five new submarines were ordered for delivery beginning in the summer of 1918. German losses continued to be heavy: in the last five months of 1917, thirty-seven U-boats were sunk; from January to April 1918, twenty-four U-boats were lost. Beginning in April, American and British shipyards were building more merchant tonnage than was being destroyed. Through all of this, as Arthur Marder has pointed out, it was not the numbers of submarines sunk that truly counted in achieving victory over the U-boats; rather, it was the survival rate of the merchant ships that were their intended victims. Sinking submarines was a bonus, not a necessity. What mattered was that the merchant ships survive and deliver their cargoes. If they could do that—because the U-boats had been avoided or forced to keep out of the way—it did not matter how many U-boats were sent to the bottom.