The first submarine in history to sink a hostile warship without also sinking herself is the E-9 of the British navy. Together with most of her consorts, she was sent, at the outbreak of the present war, to explore and reconnoiter off the German coast and the island fortress of Heligoland to find where the enemy’s ships were lying, how they were protected and how they might be attacked. After six weeks of such work, the E-9 entered Heligoland Bight on September 13, 1914, and discharged two torpedoes at the German light cruiser Hela. One exploded against her bow and the other amidships, and the cruiser went down almost immediately, drowning many of her crew.

Another British submarine had already appeared in action off Heligoland but as a saver instead of a destroyer of human life. On the 28th of August a number of German torpedo-craft and light cruisers were decoyed out to sea by the appearance and pretended flight of some English destroyers. (It has been declared but not officially confirmed that the “bait” consisted not of destroyers but two British submarines, which rose to the surface where one of them pretended to be disabled and was slowly towed away by the other till their pursuers were almost within range, when the line was cast off and both boats dived to safety.) The Germans found themselves attacked by a larger British flotilla and a confused sort of battle followed. During the mÊlÉe, an English cruiser lowered a whaleboat that picked up several survivors of a sunken German vessel. The cruiser was then driven away by a more powerful German ship, and the crew of the whaleboat found themselves left in the enemy’s waters without arms, food, or navigating instruments. Suddenly a periscope rose out of the water alongside, followed by the conning-tower and hull of the British submarine E-4, which took the Englishmen on board and left the Germans the whaleboat, after which both parties went home rejoicing.

Shortly after this, the German submarine U-15 boldly attacked a British squadron, but revealed herself by the white wake of her periscope as it cut through the calm water. A beautifully aimed shot from the cruiser Birmingham smashed the periscope. The submarine dived, temporarily safe but blinded, for she was an old-fashioned craft with only one observation instrument. Her commander now essayed a swift “porpoise dive” up to the surface and down again, exposing only the conning-tower for a very few seconds. But a broadside blazed from the Birmingham, a shell struck squarely against the conning-tower, and the sea poured in through the ragged death-wound in the deck of the U-15.

But these early affairs were now overshadowed as completely as the first Union victories in West Virginia were overshadowed by Bull Run. Another British squadron encountered another German submarine and this time the periscope was not detected. Lieutenant-Commander Otto von Weddigen had had ample time to take up an ideal position beside the path of his enemies, who passed in slow and stately procession before the bow torpedo-tubes of the U-9. The German officer pressed a button and saw through his periscope the white path of the “Schwartzkopf” as it sped straight and true to the tall side of the Aboukir. He saw the cruiser heaved into the air by the shock of the bursting war-head, then watched her settle and go down. Round swung her nearest consort to the rescue, lowering her lifeboats as she came. But scarcely had the survivors of the Aboukir’s company set foot on the deck of the Hogue than she, too, was torpedoed, and the half-naked men of both crews went tumbling down the slope of the upturned side as she rolled over and sank. Up steamed the Cressy, her gun-crews standing by their useless pieces, splendid in helpless bravery. Half reluctantly, von Weddigen sent his remaining foe to the bottom and slipped away under the waves, the victor of the strangest naval battle in history.

Not a German had received the slightest injury; fourteen hundred Englishmen had been killed. It was the loss of these trained officers and seamen, and not that of three old cruisers that would soon have been sent to the scrap heap, that was felt by the British navy. Realizing that no fears for their own lives would keep the officers of a British ship from attempting to rescue the drowning crew of another, the Admiralty issued the following order:

“It has been necessary to point out for the future guidance of his Majesty’s ships that the conditions that prevail when one vessel of a squadron is injured in a mine-field or exposed to submarine attack are analogous to those which occur in an action and that the rule of leaving disabled ships to their own resources is applicable, so far at any rate as large vessels are concerned. No act of humanity, whether to friend or foe, should lead to a neglect of the proper precautions and dispositions of war, and no measures can be taken to save life which prejudice the military situation.”

Another old cruiser, the Hermes, that had been turned into a floating base for sea-planes, was torpedoed off Dunkirk by a German submarine, most of the crew being rescued by French torpedo boats. On New Year’s day, 1915, the battleship Formidable was likewise sent to the bottom of the English Channel. She too was a rather old ship, of the same class as the Bulwark, which had been destroyed by an internal explosion two weeks earlier in the Medway, and the Irresistible, afterwards sunk by a mine in the Dardanelles.

But there was nothing small or old about the Audacious. She was—or is—a 24,800 ton superdreadnought, launched in 1911 and carrying ten thirteen-and-a-half-inch guns. This stupendous war-engine was found rolling helpless in the Irish Sea, her after compartments flooded by a great hole made either by a drifting mine or, what is more likely considering its position, by a torpedo from a German submarine. The White Star liner Olympic, which had been summoned by wireless, took the disabled warship in tow for several hours, after which the Audacious was cast off and abandoned. A photograph taken by one of the Olympic’s passengers and afterwards widely circulated shows the huge ironclad down by the stern, listing heavily to one side, and apparently on the point of sinking. But her loss has never been admitted by the British Admiralty, and it has been repeatedly declared by reputable persons that the Audacious was kept afloat till the Olympic was out of sight, and was then towed by naval vessels into Belfast, where she was drydocked and repaired at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard to be sent back to the fighting line. Her fate is one of the most interesting of the many mysteries of the war and will probably not be made clear till peace has come. The silence of the British Admiralty is explained by the standing orders forbidding the revealing of the whereabouts of any of his Majesty’s ships, particularly when helpless and disabled. It should be noted in this connection that the German government has never admitted the loss of the battleship Pommern which the Russians insist was sunk by one of their submarines in the Baltic.

Because the overwhelming strength of the Allied fleet has kept the German and Austrian battleships safely locked up behind shore batteries, mine-fields and nettings, the Allies’ submarines have had comparatively few targets to try their skill on. The activity of the British submarines in the North Sea at the outbreak of the war has already been referred to, and a year later they found another opportunity in the Baltic. There the German fleet had the same preponderance over the Russian as the English had over the German battleships in the North Sea, but the British dreadnoughts could not be sent through the long tortuous passage of the Skagerrack and Cattegat, thick-sown with German mines, without cutting the British fleet in half and giving the Germans a splendid chance to defeat either half and then slip back through the Kiel Canal and destroy the other. So England sent some of her submarines instead. One of these joined the Russian squadron defending the Gulf of Riga against a German fleet and decided the fight by disabling the great battle-cruiser Moltke. Another, the E-13, ran ashore on the Danish island of Saltholm on August 19, 1915, and was warned by the commander of a Danish torpedo-boat that she would be allowed twenty-four hours to get off. Before the time-limit had expired and while three Danish torpedo-boats were standing by, two German destroyers steamed up, torpedoed the E-13, and killed half her crew by gun-fire: an outrageous violation of Denmark’s neutrality.24 Daredevil deeds have been done by the submarines of both sides in the Dardanelles. The little B-11 swam up the straits, threading her way through mine-field after mine-field, her captain keeping his course by “dead-reckoning” with map and compass and stop watch. To have exposed his periscope would have drawn the fire of the many shore batteries, to have dived a few feet too far in those shallow waters would have meant running aground, to have misjudged the swirling, changing currents might have meant annihilation. But Commander Holbrook brought his vessel safely through, torpedoed and sank the guard-ship Messudieh, a Turkish ironclad of the vintage of 1874, and returned to receive the Victoria Cross from his king and a gigantic “Iron Cross” from his brother officers. The E-11 went up even to Constantinople, torpedoed a Turkish transport within sight of the city and threw the whole waterfront into a panic. More transports and store-ships were sunk or driven on shore in the Sea of Marmora, a gunboat was torpedoed, and then the Kheyr-el-din, an old 10,000 ton battleship that had been the KurfÜrst Freiderich Wilhelm before the kaiser sold her to Turkey, was sent to the bottom of the same waters by British submarines. One of them the E-15 ran aground in the Dardanelles and was forced to surrender to the Turks, but before they could float her off and make use of her, two steam launches dashed upstream through the fire of the shore batteries and torpedoed the stranded submarine as Cushing blew up the Albemarle.

But on the same day as the E-11’s first exploit—May 25, 1915, the British battleship Triumph went down with most of her crew off Gallipoli, torpedoed by a German submarine. The U-51 had made the 2400 mile trip from the North Sea, using as tenders a number of small tank steamers flying the Spanish flag. These vessels intentionally drew the attention of the cordon of British destroyers drawn across the Straits of Gibraltar and were captured, while the submarine swam safely through and traversed the Mediterranean to the Dardanelles. Two days after her first exploit, the U-51 or perhaps one of her Austrian consorts, sank another British battleship, the Majestic, off Gallipoli. The U-51 has been reported sunk by Russian warships in the Black Sea.

If they could sink two battleships in three days, why didn’t the German undersea boats sink a dozen or so more and raise the siege of the Dardanelles? Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of war, declared that “the presence of the submarines destroyed all hopes of Russia’s ever effectively landing troops on the coast north of Constantinople.” Then why did they permit the landing of British, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula and the plains of ancient Troy? It was not until August, 1915, that the transport Royal Edward was sunk in the Mediterranean by an Austrian submarine. Perhaps before this war is over some British transport may be torpedoed in the North Sea or the English Channel, but for more than a year and a half since its outbreak, troop-ships and store-ships have been crossing to France as if there were not a hostile “U-boat” in the world. Equally mysterious has been the immunity of the light-draft monitors and obsolescent gunboats off the Flemish coast, where their heavy guns did so much to check the first German drive on Calais, and have harassed the invaders’ right flank ever since. Many of these are mere floating platforms for one or two modern guns, all are slow-steaming, and they are not always in water too shallow for an undersea boat to swim in, yet none have been sunk by a submarine since the loss of the Hermes, in the autumn of 1914. Zeebrugge, the Belgian port that has been made the headquarters for German submarines in the North Sea, has been several times bombarded by the British fleet and, according to reports from Amsterdam, half-built submarines on the shore there have been destroyed by shell-fire. Why did the completed undersea boats in the harbor fail to come out and torpedo or drive away the attacking fleet? We have been shown what modern submarines can do; what prevents them from doing much more?

Shortly after von Weddigen’s great exploit, a German submarine rose to the surface so near the British destroyer Badger that before the undersea boat could submerge again she was rammed, cut open and sunk. One of the most picturesque and least expected features of this war has been the revival of old ways; soldiers are again wearing breastplates and metal helmets and fighting with crossbows and catapults, while against the modern submarine, seamen are effectively using the most ancient of all naval weapons: the ram. It takes two minutes for the average undersea boat to submerge, during which time a thirty-knot destroyer can come charging up from a mile away, with a good chance of scoring a hit with her forward 3-or 4-inch gun, even if she gets there too late to ram. In the case of the U-12, the submarine dived deep enough to get her hull and superstructure out of harm’s way, only to have the top of her conning-tower crushed in by the destroyer as it passed over her. When the inrush of water forced the U-12 to rise to the surface and surrender, her crew discovered that the main hatch could not be opened because one of the periscopes had been bent down across it. Some of them succeeded in climbing out of the torpedo-hatch and jumping overboard before the U-12 went down for good. As she sank stern-foremost, it was observed that both of her bow-tubes were empty; evidence that she had vainly launched two torpedoes at the British flotilla that were hunting her down. Though several British destroyers and torpedo-boats have been sent to the bottom by German submarines, and the English E-9 has sunk the German destroyer S-126, yet the nimble surface torpedo-craft have usually proved too difficult for the undersea boats to hit with their fixed tubes that can only fire straight ahead or astern.

It has been pointed out that the Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue, the Formidable, and the Audacious were all moving slowly and unescorted by any destroyers when they were attacked and sunk. The same was true of the Leon Gambetta and the Giuseppe Garibaldi, when they were sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean by Austrian submarines. Under modern conditions, such isolated big ships are in much the same perilous position as would have been a lonely battery of Union artillery marching through a country swarming with Confederate cavalry. While an escort of destroyers is no sure guarantee against submarine attack, their presence certainly seems to act as a powerful deterrent.

Waters suspected of containing hostile submarines are swept, very much as they would be for mines, by pairs of destroyers or steam trawlers, dragging an arrangement of strong cables between them. Sometimes this is festooned with explosives to blow in the side of any undersea boat it may touch. Usually the vessels engaged in this work use a large net. When they feel the weight of a catch, it is said that they let go the ends and leave it to the submarine’s own twin propellers to entangle themselves thoroughly. An undersea boat so entrapped is helpless to do anything but either sink or else empty her tanks and try to rise and surrender. A submarine in trouble usually sends up notification in the form of large quantities of escaping oil and gas.

Inventors have been busy devising new kinds of traps, snares, and exaggerated lobster-pots to be placed in the waters about the British Isles. How many German submarines have poked their noses into these devices probably not even the British Admiralty could tell, if it was so minded, but the traps are said to have been put down very plentifully and most of the published designs are extremely ingenious.

Individual torpedo-nets for ships have rather gone out of fashion, but the most effective way of keeping submarines out of a harbor is to close its entrance with booms and nettings. The principal naval bases on both sides are undoubtedly so protected. It has been persistently reported that the immunity of British transports crossing the channel is due to a double line of booms, nets and mines stretching from one shore to the other, and enclosing a broad, safe channel outside which the “U-boats” roam hungrily. There would seem to be no great difficulty in building such a barrier, but it would be extremely difficult to keep intact in heavy weather and for that reason most of our naval officers are skeptical of its existence.

Microphones which have been placed under water off the coasts of France, Great Britain, and Ireland have succeeded in detecting the presence of submarines at a distance of fifty-five miles. This device has been perfected by the joint labors of an American electrical engineer, Mr. William Dubilier, and Professor Tissot of the French Academy of Science. These two gentlemen, experimenting with microphones and a submarine placed at their disposal by the French government, “discovered in the course of the tests that the underwater craft were sources of sound waves of exceedingly high frequency, quite distinctive from any other subaqueous sounds. While the cause of the high-pitched sound is known to the inventors, it cannot be divulged since it would then be possible for German submarine constructors to eliminate the source of the tell-tale sound waves, and thus render void the purpose of the detector installation.”25

These microphones, it is believed, are usually arranged in a semicircle. Each instrument records sound waves best when they come from one particular direction. The operator on shore, listening to a device that eliminates all other sounds coming in from under the sea, can tell by the way a passing submarine affects the different microphones in the semicircle how far off and in what direction it is moving, and so warns and summons the ever-watchful patrol boats.

Air craft are doubtless being much used in the hunt for submarines, for an aviator at a height of several hundred feet can distinctly see a submarine swimming beneath him in clear water with a good light reflected from the bottom. Early in the war, the pilot and observer of a “Taube” that was brought down in the North Sea were rescued by a British submarine. In the attack on Cuxhaven a combined force of submarines, sea-planes, and light cruisers was resisted by the German shore-batteries, destroyers, “U-boats”, aeroplanes and Zeppelins. As the British sea-planes returned from dropping bombs on the Cuxhaven navy yard or taking observations above the Kiel Canal, some of them were shot down by the Germans but the aviators were picked up, as had been arranged beforehand, by English submarines. In the spring of 1915 there was an engagement between a Zeppelin and a British submarine in which each side claimed the victory. On August 26 of the same year the secretary of the British Admiralty announced:

“Squadron Commander Arthur Bigsworth, R.N., destroyed single-handed a German submarine this morning by bombs dropped from an aeroplane. The submarine was observed to be completely wrecked, and sank off Ostend.

“It is not the practice of the Admiralty to publish statements regarding the losses of German submarines, important though they have been, in cases where the enemy has no other source of information as to the time and place at which these losses have occurred. In the case referred to above, however, the brilliant feat of Squadron Commander Bigsworth was performed in the immediate neighborhood of the coast in occupation of the enemy and the position of the sunken submarine has been located by a German destroyer.”

“This is inexact,” replied the German Admiralty. “The submarine was attacked but not hit and returned to port undamaged. One of our submarines on August 16 destroyed by gunfire the benzol factory with the attached benzol warehouses and coke furnaces near Harrington, England. The statement of the English press that the submarine attacked the open towns of Harrington, Parton, and Whitehaven is inexact.”

Equally interesting but unfortunately lacking in details are the reports from the Adriatic of submarines fighting submarines. There have been three such duels, in one an Austrian sank an Italian submarine, in another the Italian was victorious, while after the third both were found lying on the bottom, each torn open by the other’s torpedo. As it is a physical impossibility for the pilot of one submarine to see another under the water, it would seem as if at least one of the combatants in each of these fights must have been running on the surface at the time. Both Mr. Simon Lake and the late John P. Holland were absolutely confident that submarines could not fight submarines, that surface craft would be utterly unable to injure or resist them, and that therefore the submarine boat would make naval warfare impossible and do more than anything else to bring about permanent peace.

All that can be said at present is that the actual situation is much more complex than had been expected. Submarines have sunk many surface warships but have suffered heavily themselves. The German government has admitted the loss of over a dozen “U-boats,” while the unofficial estimates of their enemies’ run as high as thirty-five or fifty German submarines destroyed or captured. Admiral Beatty’s victorious squadron, pursuing the German battle-cruisers after the second North Sea fight, turned and retreated at the wake of a single torpedo and the glimpse of hostile periscopes. But the submarine has not yet driven the surface warship from the seas and it has signally failed against transports. Its moral effect has been very great: British submarines have terrorized the citizens of Constantinople; while the victories of their beloved “U-boats” have cheered the German people as the victories of our frigates cheered us in 1812, and have been a somewhat similar shock to the nerves of the British navy. But that sturdy organization has recovered from more than one attack of nerves. And as the war goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that it is unfair to expect unsupported submarines, any more than unsupported frigates a century ago, to do the work of an entire navy. Like the aeroplane, the submarine was first derided as useless, next hailed as a complete substitute for all other arms, then found to be an indispensable auxiliary, whose scope and value are now being determined.