The use of the submarine for attacking war-ships is, of course, perfectly legitimate, and the powers and possibilities of this weapon were much discussed before the War. Some writers of note believed that the day of the big battleship was practically over—that such vessels could be ‘pulled down’ with certainty by any enterprising submarine commander, without any corresponding risk to his own boat. Others, with cooler or more scientific heads, maintained that there is an answer to every weapon, and that the introduction of submarines would not change the principles of war. The result has shown that the latter school of opinion was right. The submarine has achieved some striking successes here and there against the larger ships of war, but has not rendered them obsolete or kept them from going about their true business, the control of the sea; and as time goes on, it is rather the submarine than the battle-ship which is found too vulnerable to challenge a fight, when neither has the advantage of surprise.

This legitimate use of the submarine formed part, as we have seen, of both British and German war policy—though, in our own case, it was originally considered rather as a means of defence against invasion; than of offence on the high seas. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the U-boat should score first. Besides, we were offering a hundred targets to one. Our cruisers were all over the North Sea, while no German ships could be met there except an occasional mine-layer like the KÖnigin Luise. This state of things has only become more invariable as the War has developed; and the most remarkable result, so far, of the contest between the two submarine services is the practical equality of the score on the two sides. With infinitely fewer and more difficult chances, the British submarine has actually surpassed the U-boat’s record, in successes obtained against enemy ships of war, and immensely surpassed it in the proportion of successes to opportunities.

The first war-ship to fall to the torpedo of a submarine was the Pathfinder, a light cruiser of about 5,000 tons, with a complement of 268 officers and men, of whom some half were saved. The boat which sank her was the U.21, commanded by Lieutenant Hersing, who raised high hopes in Germany which he was not destined to fulfil.

A greater captain is said to have been Captain Otto Weddigen, who achieved the sensational feat of pulling down three of our cruisers in one hour, and was supposed by some of his fellow-countrymen to have solved the problem of reducing the British Fleet to an equality with the German. But he owed more to luck and our inexperience than to any peculiar skill of his own. In the early morning of September 22, 1914, he stalked the armoured cruisers Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, old ships of 12,000 tons and 18 knots’ speed, which were out on patrol duty in the North Sea, and were about to take up their stations for the day’s work. The danger of the submarine was hardly yet fully recognised; and when the Aboukir was struck by a violent explosion, the general belief in the squadron was that she had run foul of a mine. She listed heavily and sank slowly, her funnels almost level with the water, and the smoke coming out as from the water’s edge. The other two ships closed her at once, and had got within two cables of her when the Hogue was struck in turn by two torpedoes almost simultaneously. The effect was extraordinary. ‘She seemed,’ says an eye-witness, ‘to give one jump out of the water and then to go straight down.’ So quickly did she go, that she was out of sight long before Aboukir, who took twenty minutes to sink, so that her men (as one of them said) ‘got time to do the best.’

The moment the Hogue was struck, it was realised that submarines were at work, and Cressy opened fire from one of her 9·2-in. guns. She was hit herself by two torpedoes immediately afterwards, and listed heavily, so that everything began to roll down the deck. But she sank slowly and her gunners kept up their fire most gallantly, giving up their chance of being saved for the hope of killing their enemy before they went down. They fired a dozen shots in all, and are said by Lieutenant Harrison to have sunk one of the attacking U-boats. ‘I reckon her gunners,’ said a survivor from the Aboukir, ‘were about the bravest men that ever lived. They kept up the firing until she had 40 degrees of list. They died gamely, did those fellows.’ Their shipmates were worthy of them. ‘There was absolutely no panic on the cruiser; the men were as calm as at drill.’ At last some trawlers came up; and, after two hours, some destroyers. Only 777 of the three ships’ crews were saved, out of a total of about 2,100; and 60 officers were lost out of 120. ‘Some of our men must have been in the water for three or four hours. The Aboukir men were taken to the Hogue; when the Hogue was sunk, they were taken to the Cressy; when the Cressy was taken, they were thrown in the sea again. Yet here they are, and there is only one thing they want—to go to sea again and have another whack at the men who torpedoed them.’

Possibly they had their wish; for some of them may have been on board the British ship which, a few months later, destroyed U.29 (Weddigen’s boat) by a brilliant and almost reckless feat of seamanship, which, in later days, will form a favourite yarn of the Service.

The only other war-ship lost by submarine action in 1914 was the Hawke, an armoured cruiser twenty-five years old, which was torpedoed while on patrol in the North Sea, and sank in ten minutes, only seventy of those on board being saved. The year 1915 began badly for us, and ended by being decidedly our worst year on one side the account, though it was our best on the other. At 2 o’clock in the morning of January 1, a squadron of battle-ships, of the older types of 1901 and 1902, was steaming down Channel in line ahead. There was a gale blowing, and the sea was running high. The last two ships of the line were the London and the Formidable, the latter of which was suddenly shaken by a violent explosion, and not long afterwards by a second one. Even then, the ship did not sink till forty-five minutes after; and if it had not been for the rough weather and icy water, boats and rafts might have been got away with most of the crew. As it was, no steam-pinnaces could be got out, and the oars of the 42-foot cutter and other boats were nearly all smashed against the ship’s sides. The whole company, from the officers, giving quiet orders on the bridge, to the men smoking on the slant deck, behaved as if at manoeuvres, and Captain Loxley, who went down with his ship, distinguished himself by signalling to the London not to stand by him, as there was a submarine about. One boat came ashore at Lyme Regis, with forty-six live men and nine dead in her; seventy more men were brought in after three hours’ hard and dangerous work by the 50-ton smack, Provident, of Brixham—William Pillar, skipper. His crew consisted of three men and a cook-boy. Out of a total complement of more than 700, only 201 were saved in all. Among the lost were thirty-four officers, including eight midshipmen and a sub-lieutenant.

On March 11, the Bayano, an armed merchant-cruiser, was torpedoed off the Firth of Clyde, and went down with 170 of her 200 men. On April 11, the Wayfarer transport was torpedoed, and ran ashore off Queenstown. On May 1, the Recruit, a small torpedo-boat of 385 tons, was sunk in the North Sea, with thirty-nine out of her sixty-four officers and men.

Then came two grave losses on two consecutive days. The British Fleet off Gallipoli had already lost the Irresistible and Ocean by floating mines; and now the U-boats succeeded in inflicting another double loss on us, at a moment when the Army needed the strongest support to ensure success. On May 26, a single torpedo sank the Triumph, while she was co-operating with the Australian and New Zealand troops before Ari Burnu. She was accompanied by an escort of two destroyers, and was about to open fire when the submarine got a shot into her. She listed till her deck touched the water, and in five minutes capsized completely, but remained floating for twenty minutes, keel upwards. Some 460 of the officers and men were saved.

The Triumph was not designed for our Navy, but taken over from the builder’s yard, and the curious arch formed by her derricks made her outline a conspicuously foreign feature in our Fleet. The Majestic, on the other hand, which quickly followed her to destruction, was a typically British vessel, and gave her name to the whole class, built in 1895 and the following years, and then greatly admired. She also, on May 27, was supporting the army in action on the Gallipoli peninsula, when a German torpedo ended her twenty years’ career. She carried about 760 officers and men, but nearly all of them were saved. In June, two torpedo-boats, the Greenfly and Mayfly, of 215 tons, were sunk; the Roxburgh, a 10,000-ton cruiser, was slightly damaged; and the Lightning torpedo-boat, of 275 tons, was disabled, but brought into harbour. On August 8, a U-boat sank one of our large auxiliary cruisers, the India, off the coast of Norway and in Norwegian territorial waters. By this breach of the rules, she succeeded in killing 10 officers and 150 men, out of a complement of over 300.

The losses so far enumerated were all strictly naval losses. Up to this time, although we had been transporting troops by the hundred thousand from Canada and Australia to England, and from England to France, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Gallipoli, our numbers had hardly suffered the smallest diminution by submarine action. Again, during the last three years (1916–18) we have had minor losses now and then; but the one and only real disaster of this kind came upon us in 1915. On August 14, the British transport, the Royal Edward, was in the Ægean, carrying reinforcements for the 29th Division in Gallipoli, and details of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank rapidly. She had on board 32 military officers and 1,350 troops, in addition to her own crew of 220 officers and men. Of all these, only 600 were saved; and for the first time in modern war we suffered the cruel loss of soldiers to the strength of a whole battalion killed—not in battle, but helpless and unresisting, without the chance of firing a shot or delivering a last charge with the bayonet. The ship herself was a less harrowing loss; but she was a fine vessel that we could ill spare—a steel triple-screw steamer of 11,117 tons and 545 feet in length. She, like her sister ship, the Royal George, was originally built for the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company, and ran between Marseilles and Alexandria. Her later service was carrying the mails for the Canadian Northern Steamship Company between Avonmouth and Montreal—and now she had returned to Eastern waters, only to give an isolated and inconclusive triumph to a desperate enemy.

The remainder of the year saw many attempts by the U-boat commanders to repeat this success; but they mostly ended in failure. On September 2, the transport Southland was hit by a torpedo, but got into Madras under her own steam, with a loss of 30 men killed in the explosion. On September 19, the Ramazan, with 385 Indian troops on board, was shelled and sunk by a submarine, off Antikythera. In October, the transport Marquette was sunk in the Ægean. On November 3, the transport Mercian was heavily shelled, and had nearly 100 killed and wounded. On November 5 the Tara, armed boarding-steamer, was sunk in the Bay of Sollum, on the eastern border of Egypt; and immediately afterwards two small Customs cruisers—the Prince Abbas of 300 tons and the Abdul Moneim of 450—were sunk at the same place, and no doubt by the same pair of U-boats.

The year 1916 showed clearly that, as a weapon against armed ships, the U-boat was not likely to succeed, after the first period of surprise was past. During this year we lost three mine-sweepers—Primula, Clacton, and Genista; two empty transports—the Russian and Franconia; the Zaida and Duke of Albany, armed steamers of the auxiliary patrol; and one destroyer, the Lassoo, which was sunk with a loss of six men, either by mine or torpedo, off the coast of Holland. To this insignificant list must be added one disaster of a more serious kind. As we have already noted, our control of the North Sea was a continuous and effective control, and every effort was made, especially after the flight of the Germans from Jutland, to bring out the enemy fleet from its hiding-place. These efforts, of course, involved the exposure of our advanced forces to certain risks. On August 19, there was a report that the High Canal Fleet was at sea again. Hope outstripped belief, and light cruisers were sent out in every direction to find the enemy. Two of these, the Nottingham and the Falmouth—good ships of 5,400 and 5,250 tons—were torpedoed and sunk while scouting. Here again it was the loss of the men which we felt most. The ships were new and useful ones; but they could be replaced, and they belonged to a class in which the enemy’s force, since the battle of Jutland, had been deficient, almost to a disabling degree. There was no ground for the German hope that our naval superiority could be permanently whittled away by rare and fractional losses like these. Our Battle Fleet continued to hold up theirs, and our blockade of their coasts was in no degree weakened.

The record of 1917, and the first half of 1918, is even more significant. The German submarine effort was more and more completely diverted from legitimate to illegitimate war—from the attack on the enemy’s armed forces, to the destruction of non-combatants and neutrals in mercantile shipping of any kind. British destroyers, going everywhere, facing every kind of risk, and protecting everyone before themselves, now and again furnished an item to the German submarine bag; but the ‘regardless’ campaign against the world’s trade and the world’s tonnage was now the U-boats’ chief occupation. One legitimate objective they did still set before themselves—the destruction or hindrance of transport for the United States army between the shores of America and Europe. Again and again during 1917, and even in the earlier days of 1918, assurances were given to the German people by Admiral von Tirpitz, by Admiral von Capelle, by the Prussian Minister of Finance in the Diet, and by the chief military writers in the Press, that the promise of an American army was a boast and a deception, that the American troops could not and would not cross the Atlantic, because of the triumphant activity of the U-boats. Of the complete failure to make good these assurances no better account need be given than that supplied by the German Admiralty, in answer to the complaints of their own people. Towards the end of July 1918, when there was no longer any possibility of concealing the presence of a large and victorious American force in France, Admiral von Holtzendorff, the Admiralty Chief of Staff, gave the following explanation to the KÖlnische Zeitung. He admitted the success of the Allies in improving oversea transport, especially the transport of troops from America. But in reply to the statement that there was in Germany much disappointment that the submarines had sunk so few of the American transports, he asked, with truly Prussian effrontery, how could submarines be specially employed against American transports. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have at their disposition, for disembarkation, the coasts from the North of Scotland to the French Mediterranean ports, with dozens of landing-places. Ought we to let our submarines lie in wait before these ports, to see whether they can possibly get a shot at a strongly protected American transport, escorted by fast convoying vessels? The convoys do not arrive with the regularity and frequency of railway trains at a great station, but irregularly, at great intervals of time, and often at night or in a fog. Taking all this into consideration, it is evident how little prospect of success is offered for the special employment of submarines against American transports.’

This is all sound enough, and in fact the U-boats have only succeeded in killing 126 men out of the first million landed from America. But the argument of Admiral von Holtzendorff does not explain the official assurances by which the German public was deceived for more than a year, and it only partially explains the ill success of the U-boats. That could only be fully done by considering the offensive (or offensive-defensive) action of war-ship against submarine—which will be touched upon presently.

The record of the ‘bag’ made during the War by our own submarines has never yet been published in a complete form. Yet it is a most striking one, and ought effectually to remove any impression that the German Submarine Service is in any way superior—or even equal—to ours. In three years of war our boats sank over 300 enemy vessels. We lost, of course, many more; but when it is remembered that we were offering to our enemies every week more than four times as many targets as they offered us during the whole three years, it will be admitted that the comparison is not one to give them much ground for satisfaction. At present, however, this general comparison is not the one which we wish to make—we are concerned now with attacks on war-ships, or armed forces, and not on mercantile shipping. The greater part of our record is made up of such attacks, and it is now possible to give a short summary of them.

There have been, during this War, practically only three hunting-grounds where British submarines could hope to meet with enemy war-ships, transports, or supply ships. These are the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora. Of the work done by our submarines in the Baltic and Dardanelles we shall have separate accounts to give in later chapters. For the present, it is enough to tabulate the results. In the Baltic the bag included, besides a large number of steamers (some carrying iron ore for military use), the following war-ships: three destroyers, three transports, one old battleship or cruiser, one light cruiser, and one armed auxiliary. In the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora were sunk or destroyed the following, besides a very large number of ships with stores or provisions for the troops in Gallipoli: two battle-ships, four gun-boats, one armed German auxiliary, seven transports, three ammunition ships and one ammunition train, destroyed by gunfire. We may add, as a note to these two parts of our record, that the work was done, not by a large number of submarines issuing in relays from a home base close at hand, and equipped with every kind of facility for repairing defects or relieving tired crews, but by an almost incredibly small number of boats, working far from their base, in closed waters, and under difficulties such as no German boat has ever successfully attempted to face.

There remains the North Sea patrol. The first success in this record stands against a famous name—that of Commander Max Horton, who (in his boat E.9) afterwards established what has been called ‘The Command of the Baltic.’ In September 13, 1914, he was in the North Sea, near to enemy forces. He was submerged, and not in the happiest of circumstances, for one of his officers was ill, and to afford him some relief from the exhausted atmosphere below, it became imperatively necessary to rise to the surface. No sooner was the periscope above water, than the commander sighted a German light cruiser, the HÉla, in a position where she might be expected to see the periscope and attack at any moment. Fortunately a torpedo-tube was loaded and bearing. Commander Horton took a snap-shot and dived. The shot went home, and the HÉla troubled the patrol of E.9 no more. On October 6, a German destroyer (S.116) fell to another shot from the same hand.

After this, game was much scarcer. The German Admiralty tried to establish a paper command of the North Sea, kept up (for the benefit of the German public) by runaway raids on our East Coast towns; but anything like a regular patrol was impossible to discover. In the following eighteen months, however, our submarines did succeed in two attacks on stray German destroyers, and four on armed auxiliary vessels. Lieut.-Commander Benning (E.5) hit an auxiliary in April 1915, but did not sink her. In June, Lieut.-Commander Moncrieffe hit another, the America, so badly that she was run ashore. In September, Commander Benning sank a third outright; and in December, Lieut.-Commander Duff-Dunbar (E.16) secured a larger one of 3,000 tons. Of the destroyers, the first (V.188) was got by Commander C.P. Talbot, in E.16, on July 26; and the second on February 4, 1916, by Lieut.-Commander H.W. Shove, in E.29. This was a boat of the ‘S.138’ class, but she could not be further identified, nor did any British eye actually witness her final disappearance.

The rest of the bag is, for the most part, a forbidden subject. The items are many, the loss to the enemy was great; but as he is racking his brains to get or guess the details, it is no part of our business to help him. There are, however, two items of which we may speak with open satisfaction. One is the capture of a German trawler—of this we have already heard from the Admiral Commanding our Submarine Base, in Chapter IV. The simple story is that Lieut.-Commander G. Kellett, finding his boat (S.1) so far disabled that she could not get home on her own engines, took over a German trawler by force, without attracting undue attention, and came safely into port, towed from enemy waters by an enemy boat. The remaining item hardly falls within our range; but though not submarine work, it is work actually done by a submarine, and may be classed, perhaps, with the destruction of the ammunition train by Lieut.-Commander Cochrane at Yarandji. On May 4, 1916, a Zeppelin (L.7) fell to Lieut.-Commander F.E.B. Feilman, in E.31, and he brought home seven of her crew as prisoners.

Even this is not all. In 1916, our submarines inflicted on the German Fleet itself four blows, which, though they were none of them actually fatal, must yet have been extremely damaging to the nerve of the Service, and certainly cost heavily for repairs both in time and labour. On August 19, the Westfalen—a battle-ship of 18,000 tons, built in 1908—was torpedoed by Lieut.-Commander Turner, in E.23. On October 19, Lieut.-Commander Jessop severely damaged the light cruiser MÜnchen, of 3,200 tons; and on November 5, Commander Lawrence (in J.1) achieved the brilliant feat of torpedoing two German Dreadnoughts—the Grosser Kurfurst, which was laid down in 1913 and finished since the War began, and the Kronprinz, which was both laid down and commissioned since August 1914. A success of this kind, though not final, may well be set against the sinking of much older and more vulnerable ships, like the Formidable, Triumph, and Majestic; and it must be remembered that the disappearance of these three from our Navy List, however regrettable, had absolutely no effect on the relative strength of the British and German Battle Fleets; whereas the loss, for some months at any rate, of two great Dreadnoughts like the Grosser Kurfurst and Kronprinz—coming as it did shortly after the Jutland losses—carried the inferiority of Admiral von Scheer’s force to the point of impotence. In the match of submarine against war-ship, our boats had succeeded where the U-boats had signally failed.