“It is true that submarine boats have improved, but they are as useless as ever. Nevertheless, the German navy is carefully watching their progress, though it has no reason to make experiments itself.”

Admiral von Tirpitz, in 1901.

“DANGER!
Being the Log of Captain John Sirius
by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

If you have not read the above-mentioned story by the author of Sherlock Holmes, I advise you to go to the nearest public library and ask for it. For those that cannot spare the time to do this, here are a brief outline and a few quotations.

Captain John Sirius is supposed to be chief of submarines in the navy of Norland, a small European kingdom at war with England. With only eight submarines, he establishes a blockade of Great Britain and begins sinking all ships bringing in food. He enters a French harbor, though France is at peace with his country, and sinks three British ships that have taken refuge there.

“I suppose,” says the captain, “they thought they were safe in French waters but what did I care about three-mile limits and international law! The view of my government was that England was blockaded, food contraband, and vessels carrying it to be destroyed. The lawyers could argue about it afterwards. My business was to starve the enemy any way I could.”

Presently he overtook an American ship and sank her by gunfire as her skipper shouted protests over the rail.

“It was all the same to me what flag she flew so long as she was engaged in carrying contraband of war to the British Isles.... Of course I knew there would be a big row afterwards and there was.”

“The terror I had caused had cleared the Channel.”

“There was talk of a British invasion (of Norland) but I knew this to be absolute nonsense, for the British had learned by this time that it would be sheer murder to send transports full of soldiers to sea in the face of submarines. When they have a Channel tunnel, they can use their fine expeditionary force upon the Continent but until then it might not exist so far as Europe is concerned.”

“Heavens, what would England have done against a foe with thirty or forty submarines?”

The British navy could do nothing to stop Captain John Sirius. One of his submarines was sunk by an armed liner, but with the remaining seven he sank the Olympic and so many other vessels that no one dared try to bring food into Great Britain. At the end of six weeks, fifty thousand people there had died of starvation and the British government had to make peace with Norland and pay for all the damage the submarines had done to neutrals. As a warning to his countrymen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this story in May, 1914. Before it was published,26 England was at war with Germany. On February 4, 1915, the famous “War Zone Decree” was published in Berlin.

“The waters around Great Britain, including the whole of the English Channel, are declared hereby to be included within the zone of war, and after the 18th inst, all enemy merchant vessels encountered in these waters will be destroyed, even if it may not be possible always to save their crews and passengers.

“Within this war-zone neutral vessels are exposed to danger since, in view of the misuse of the neutral flags ordered by the government of Great Britain on the 31st ult., and of the hazards of naval warfare, neutral ships cannot always be prevented from suffering from the attacks intended for enemy ships.

“The routes of navigation around the north of the Shetland Islands in the eastern part of the North Sea and in a strip thirty miles wide along the Dutch coast are not open to the danger-zone.”

But those routes had been closed three months before by the British government, which declared that it had had the North Sea planted with anchored contact mines, but that all ships trading to neutral ports would, if they first called at some British port, be given safe conduct to Holland or Scandinavia, by way of the English Channel. This way would run through the proposed “war-zone.”

International law says nothing about either “war-zones” or submarines. In all probability, special rules for undersea warfare will be drawn up by a conference of delegates from the leading countries of the world soon after the end of the present war. But till then, no such conference can be held, and the United States has always maintained, even when it has been to its disadvantage to do so, that no one nation can change international law to suit herself. We insist that the game be played according to the rules. A submarine has no more rights than any other warship. It may sink a merchantman if the latter tries to fight or escape. If the captured vessel is found to be carrying contraband to the enemy’s country, the warship may either take her into port as a prize or, if this is impracticable, sink her. But before an unarmed and unresisting merchant vessel can be sunk, the passengers and crew must be given time and opportunity to escape.

President Wilson gave notice on February 10, 1915, that if, by act of the commander of any German warship, an American vessel or the lives of American citizens should be lost on the high seas, the United States “would be constrained to hold the Imperial government of Germany to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities and to take any steps that might be necessary to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyments of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.”

On the same day, a note to Great Britain voiced our objection to the “explicit sanction by a belligerent government for its merchant ships generally to fly the flag of a neutral power within certain portions of the high seas which are presumed to be frequented with hostile warships.”

To this Sir Edward Grey replied that “the British government have no intention of advising their merchant shipping to use foreign flags as a general practice or resort to them otherwise than for escaping capture or destruction.”

Such “sailing under false colors” to fool the enemy’s cruisers is an old and well-established right of merchantmen of belligerent countries. Its abuse, under present-day conditions, however, might have given the German submarine commanders a plausible excuse for sinking neutral vessels. To avoid this, neutral shipowners began to paint the name, port, and national colors on the broadside of each of their steamers, plain enough to be read from afar through a periscope.

Then the time came for the war-zone decree to be put into effect, and the world watched with great interest and no little apprehension to see what the submarine blockaders could do.

Seven British ships were sunk during the first six days. Then came a lull, followed by the announcement by the British Admiralty that between February 23 to March 3, 3805 transoceanic ships had arrived at British ports, 669 had cleared and none had been lost, while two German submarines had been sunk. During the eleven weeks between the establishing of the blockade and the sinking of the Lusitania, forty-two oversea vessels and twenty-eight fishing boats of British registry had been sunk by the submarines, but 16,190 liners and freighters had safely run the blockade. The largest number of vessels sunk by the “U-boats” in any one week was thirty-six, between June 23 and 30; while nineteen British merchantmen, with a total tonnage of 76,000, and three fishing vessels were destroyed either by submarines or mines during the week ending August 25. The total number sunk in the first six months was 485. But with more than fifteen hundred ships coming and going every week, the submarine blockade of the British Isles was obviously a failure.

It was a costly failure from the military point of view. The expenditure of torpedoes alone must have been considerable and a modern Whitehead or Schwartzkopf costs from five to eight thousand dollars and takes several months to build. How many of the “U-boats” themselves have fallen prey to the British patroling craft, traps, mines, and drag-nets cannot be computed with any accuracy, but by the first of September, 1915, the number declared to be lost “on the authority of a high official in the British Admiralty” ran anywhere from thirty to fifty. Even if she has been completing a new submarine every week since the war began, Germany cannot afford the loss of so much material, and still, less, of so many trained men. Captain Persius, one of the foremost German writers on naval affairs, pointed this out in a newspaper article that brought a hurricane of angry criticism about his ears. How great has been the wear and tear on the nervous systems of the submarine crews is shown by the following extract from the statement of Captain Hansen of the captured U-16.

“It is fearfully trying on the nerves. Not every man can endure it. While running under the sea there is deathlike stillness in the boats, as the electrical machinery is noiseless.... As the air becomes heated it gets poor and mixed with the odor of oil from the machinery. The atmosphere becomes fearful. An overpowering sleepiness often attacks new men and one requires the utmost will power to keep awake. I have had men who did not want to eat during the first three days out because they did not want to lose that amount of time from sleep. Day after day spent in such cramped quarters, where there is hardly room to stretch your legs, and remaining constantly on the alert, is a tremendous strain on the nerves.”

But if there is discomfort below the surface there is peril of death above. Yet a submarine must spend as much time as possible on top of the water, even off the enemy’s coast, to spare the precious storage batteries and let the Diesel engines grind oil into electricity by using the electric motor as a dynamo. If she could renew her batteries under water or pick up a useable supply of current as she can pick up a drum of oil from a given spot on the sea-bottom, then the modern submarine would indeed be a hard fish to catch. As it is, great ingenuity has been shown by the German skippers in minimizing the dangers of surface cruising and at the same time stalking their prey. One big submarine masqueraded as a steamer, with dummy masts and funnel. Innocent-looking steam trawlers flying neutral flags acted as screens and lookouts, besides carrying supplies. One of these boldly entered a British harbor, where it was noticed that her decks were cumbered with very many coils of rope. The authorities investigated and found snugly stowed in the center of each a large can of fuel-oil. Another trawler, flying the Dutch flag, was stopped in the North Sea by a British cruiser and searched by a boarding-party. They were going back into their boat, after finding everything apparently as it should be, when one of the Englishmen noticed a mysterious pipe sticking out of the trawler’s side. They swarmed on board again and discovered that the fishing-boat had a complete double hull, the space between being filled with oil. The trawler’s crew were removed to the cruiser and a strong detachment of bluejackets left in their place. A few hours afterwards, there was a swirl of water alongside and a German submarine came up for refreshments. It was promptly captured and so was another that presently followed it: a good day’s catch for one small fishing-boat.

Because of the uncertainty and danger of depending on underwater caches and tenders, each blockader usually returned at the end of two or three weeks to Heligoland, Zeebruge, Ostend, or some other base to take on supplies, report progress and rest the crew. This of course reduces the number of submarines actually on guard. How large that number may have been at any particular time since the blockade began is unknown to everybody except a few persons in Berlin. At the outbreak of the war, Germany had between twenty and twenty-five submarines in commission and a dozen or so under construction. If, as is claimed, the Germans have been completing a new undersea boat every week since the war began, that would have given them by August 1, 1915, a flotilla of seventy-seven, exclusive of losses. If only thirty had been lost, that would have left fewer than fifty submarines to blockade more than fifty seaports, great and small, scattered over more than twenty-five hundred miles of coast.

Moreover, these widely scattered blockaders would have to be on duty by night as well as by day. But at night or in fog the periscope is useless; to intercept an incoming steamer, running swiftly and without lights, the submarine must rise and cruise on the surface. It cannot use a searchlight to locate the blockade-runner without consuming much precious voltage and at the same time attracting the nearest patrol-boat.

The same disadvantages apply to sending wireless messages from one blockading submarine to another. And as the wireless apparatus of an undersea boat is necessarily low-powered and has a narrow radius, while “oscillators,” bells, and other underwater signaling devices are still in their infancy, it would seem as if the German “U-boats” in British waters must have been suffering from lack of coÖperation and team-play. If the captain of a Union gunboat, lying off Charleston during the Civil War, caught a glimpse of a blockade runner, he could alarm the rest of the fleet with rockets and signal guns, but the commander of the U-99 off Queenstown cannot count on his consorts if he himself fails to sink an approaching liner.

Perhaps the most notable shortcoming of the submarine blockade has been its failure to inspire terror. Contrary to the expectations of nearly every forecaster from Robert Fulton to Conan Doyle, the sinking of the first merchant vessels by submarines failed to frighten away any others. Cargo rates are high in war-time and insurance covers the owners’ risk, so few sailing orders were canceled. As for the captains, they are not noted for timidity, and professional pride is strong among them; most of them have families to provide for, and every one of them knows that behind him stands an eager young mate with a master’s ticket, ready to take the risk and take out the ship if the skipper quits. So the merchant marine accepted the submarine as one of the risks of the trade.

When a big German submarine rose up off the Irish coast within easy gunshot of the homeward-bound British steamer Anglo-Californian and signaled for her to heave to, the plucky English skipper slammed his engine-room telegraph over to “Full speed ahead.” Away dashed the steamer and after her came the submarine,27 making good practice with her 8.8 centimeter gun. Twenty shrapnel shells burst over the Anglo-Californian, riddling her upper works, slaughtering thirty of her cargo of horses, killing seven of her crew and wounding eight more. Steering with his own hands, Captain Archibald Panlow held his vessel on her course till a shrapnel bullet killed him, when the wheel was taken by his son, the second mate, who brought the Anglo-Californian safely into Queenstown. It is men of this breed who have kept Admiral von Tirpitz from saying, in the words of the fictitious Captain John Sirius, “The terror I had caused had cleared the channel.”

But because the “Campaign of Frightfulness” has failed and a few score of unsupported submarines have been unable to blockade the British Isles, it is stupid to pretend that there has been no progress since 1901 and say as Admiral von Tirpitz said then,

“Submarines are as useless as ever.”

Like every other type of naval craft, submarines are useful but not omnipotent. We have seen what they can do in action and what they have failed to do. As scouts in the enemy’s waters they are invaluable. As commerce destroyers, they do the work of the swift-sailing privateers of a century ago. In the fall of 1915, British submarines in the Baltic almost put a stop to the trade between Germany and Sweden. But to blockade a coast effectively, submarines must have tenders, which must have destroyers and light cruisers to defend them, which in turn require the support of battle-cruisers and dreadnoughts, with their attendant host of colliers, hospital ships and air-scouts. Nor can a coast be long defended by submarines, mine-fields and shore-batteries, if there are not enough trained troops to keep the enemy, who can always land at some remote spot, from marching round to the rear of the coast-defenses. This war is simply repeating the old, old lesson that there are no cheap and easy substitutes for a real army and a real navy.