Transcriber’s Note: Italics is indicated by _underscores_; boldface is
indicated by =equals signs=.
[Illustration: “Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and
cursed us.”]
SUBMARINE
AND
ANTI-SUBMARINE
BY
HENRY NEWBOLT
AUTHOR OF ‘THE BOOK OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR,’ ‘TALES OF THE GREAT WAR,’
ETC.
WITH A COLOURED FRONTISPIECE AND 20 FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY NORMAN WILKINSON, R.I.
NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919
TO
JOHN BUCHAN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SPIRIT OF SUBMARINE WAR 1
II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBMARINE 10
III. THE SUBMARINE OF TO-DAY 36
IV. A BRITISH SUBMARINE BASE 52
V. SUBMARINES AND WAR POLICY 68
VI. SUBMARINE _v._ WAR-SHIP 78
VII. WAR-SHIP _v._ SUBMARINE 95
VIII. BRITISH SUBMARINES IN THE BALTIC 108
IX. BRITISH SUBMARINES IN THE DARDANELLES 125
X. THE U-BOAT BLOCKADE 161
XI. TRAWLERS, SMACKS, AND DRIFTERS 178
XII. THE DESTROYERS 201
XIII. P-BOATS AND AUXILIARY PATROL 216
XIV. Q-BOATS 231
XV. SUBMARINE _v._ SUBMARINE 256
XVI. THE HUNTED 272
XVII. ZEEBRUGGE AND OSTEND 295
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
‘Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and cursed
us’ (_Coloured_) _Frontispiece_
‘Does not look like any ship you have ever seen’ 47
‘Towed back by an enemy trawler’ 59
‘She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her’ 63
‘Turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats’ 75
‘Were brought in by the 50-ton smack _Provident_ of Brixham’ 83
‘She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him’ 99
‘The Russian ice-breakers freed them from the harbour ice’ 121
‘The Fort gave them 200 rounds at short range’ 129
‘Made her fast alongside his conning-tower’ 135
‘She was mortally hit’ 149
‘_I’ll Try’s_ shell struck the base of the conning-tower’ 185
‘The U-boat started with an enormous advantage of gun power’ 199
‘U.C.-boats stealing in across the black and silver water’ 211
‘The diver who first went down found the submarine lying on her
side’ 229
‘A fourth boat was partially lowered with a proper amount of
confusion’ 241
‘The U-boat never recovered from the surprise’ 245
‘Was steering about in figures of 8, with his gun still manned’ 265
‘A huge column of water which fell plump on the Commander’ 287
‘The submarine suddenly broke surface’ 291
‘A tremendous explosion was seen at the shore end of the Mole’ 305
SUBMARINE AND ANTI-SUBMARINE
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF SUBMARINE WAR
It is probable that a good deal of the information contained in this
book will be new to the public; for it has been collected under
favour of exceptional circumstances. But the reader will gain little
if he cannot contribute something on his side--if he cannot share
with the writer certain fundamental beliefs. The first of these is
that every nation has a spirit of its own--a spirit which is the
mainspring of national action. It is more than a mechanical spring;
for it not only supplies a motive force, but determines the moral
character of the action which results. When we read the history of
nations, and especially the history of their explorations, wars, and
revolutions, we soon recognise the spirit of each, and learn to expect
its appearance in every moment of crisis or endurance. If it duly
appears, our impression is confirmed; if it fails on any occasion, we
are disappointed. But the disappointments are few--nations may at times
surprise us; but, as a rule, they are like themselves. Even when they
develop and seem to change, they are apt, under the stress of action,
to return to their aboriginal character, and to exhibit it in their
old historic fashion. To attempt, then, to give an account of any
national struggle, without paying attention to the influence of the
characteristic spirit of the country or countries concerned, would be
a difficult undertaking, and a mistaken one. Even in a short crisis, a
great people will probably display its historic colours, and in a long
one it certainly will. To ignore this, to describe national actions
without giving a sense of the animating spirit, would be not only a
tame and inadequate method; it would lower the value of life itself by
making mere prose of what should, by right, partake of the nature of
poetry. History cannot often be entirely poetical, or poetry entirely
historical. When Homer told the tale of Troy, he did not make prose--or
even history--of it. He everywhere infused into it ‘an incomparable
ardour’--he made an epic. But Mr. Thomas Hardy wrote history in ‘The
Dynasts,’ and made it an epic too. An epic--the common definition tells
us--is ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style.’
‘The Dynasts’ certainly is that--the struggle is great, the issues
are great, the men are great. Even more than their heroic fighting,
their speech and manners in the moment of action are such as to show
unfailingly by what a distinctive and ever-present spirit national life
may be sustained and magnified.
When we come to nearer times, and more familiar events, the same
necessity is upon us. What writer of artistic sense, or scientific
honesty, would touch, for example, the history of modern Egypt without
attempting to understand the character of such men as Gordon and
Cromer, and the spirit which (however personal and diverse in its
manifestations) they both drew from the nation that sent them forth?
Such an understanding would enable the narrator to carry us all with
him. For every man of our national birth and breeding would feel,
when he was told the story of such heroes, not only their superiority
but their likeness to himself. ‘There,’ he would say, ‘but for lack
of fortune, or opportunity, or courage, or stature, there goes John
Smith.’ It is admiration which helps us to feel that, and a mean spirit
which conceals it from us.
Further, it is my belief that the historian who would deal adequately
with our present War must have an even wider understanding and
sympathy. He must have a broad enough view to recognise all the various
motives which impelled us, section by section, to enter the struggle;
and a deep enough insight to perceive that, below all motives which can
be expressed or debated in words, there was an instinct--a spontaneous
emotion--which irresistibly stirred the majority of our people, and
made us a practically unanimous nation. He must be able to see that
this unanimity was no freak--no sudden outburst--but the natural
fulfilment of a strong and long-trained national character; and he must
trace, with grateful admiration, the national service contributed by
many diverse classes, and by a large number of distinguished men--the
leaders and patterns of the rest. However scientific the historian’s
judgments, and however restrained his style, it must be impossible for
any reader to miss the real point of the narrative--the greatness of
the free nations, and the nobility of their heroes. Belgians, Serbians,
French, Italians, Americans--all must hear their great men honoured,
and their corporate virtues generously recognised. We Britons, for our
own part, must feel, at every mention of the names of our champions,
the fine sting of the invisible fire with which true glory burns the
heart. It must never be possible to read, without an uplifting of the
spirit, the achievements of commanders like Smith-Dorrien, Haig, and
Birdwood--Plumer and Rawlinson, Allenby and Byng, and Horne; or the
fate of Cradock and Kitchener; or the sea-fights of Beatty and Sturdee,
of Keyes and Tyrwhitt. It must be clear, from the beginning to the end
of the vast record, that the British blood has equalled and surpassed
its ancient fame--that in every rank the old virtues of courage,
coolness, and endurance, of ordered energy and human kindliness, have
been, not the occasional distinction, but the common characteristics
of our men. Look where you will on the scene of war, you must be shown
‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style’--fit, at
least, to indicate the greatness of the national spirit.
In this book our concern is with the war at sea, and with a part only
of that gigantic effort. But of this part, every word that has been
said holds good. The submarine and anti-submarine campaign is not a
series of minor operations. Its history is not a mere episode among
chapters of greater significance. On the contrary, the fate of Britain,
and the fate of Germany, were speedily seen to be staked upon the issue
of this particular contest, as they have been staked upon no other
part of the world-wide struggle. The entrance of America into the
fellowship of nations was involved in it. The future of civilisation
depends upon it. Moreover, in its course the British seaman has shown
himself possessed, in the highest degree, of the qualities by which
his forefathers conquered and kept our naval predominance; and finally,
it is in the submarine war that we see most sharply the contrast of the
spirit of chivalry with the spirit of savagery; of the law of humanity
with the lawlessness of brute force; of the possible redemption of
social life with its irretrievable degradation. It is a subject worthy,
thrice over, of treatment in a national epic.
The present book is not an epic--it is not a poetical work at all.
Half of it is mere technical detail; and the rest plain fact plainly
told. But it is far from my intention that the sense of admiration
for national heroes, or the recognition of national greatness, shall
be absent from it. I have used few epithets; for they seemed to me
needless and inadequate. The stories of the voyages and adventures
of our own submarines, and of the fighting of our men against the
pirates, need no heightening. They need only to be read and understood;
and it is chiefly with a view to their better understanding, that
the reader is offered a certain amount of comment and description in
the earlier chapters. But a suggestion or two may be made here, at
the very beginning, in the hope of starting a train of thought which
may accompany the narrative with a whisper of historic continuity--a
reminder that as with men, so with nations--none becomes utterly base
on a sudden, or utterly heroic. Their vices and their virtues are the
harvesting of their past.
Let us take a single virtue, like courage, which is common to all
nations but shows under a different form or colour in each, and
so becomes a national characteristic, plainly visible in action.
A historical study of British courage would, I believe, show two
facts: first, that the peculiar quality of it has persisted for
centuries; and, secondly, that if our people have changed at all in
this respect, they have only changed in the direction of greater
uniformity. Once they had two kinds of courage in war; now they have
but one, and that by far the better one. In the old days, among the
cool and determined captains of our race, there were always a certain
number of hot heads--‘men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm
without reason, of will without science.’ The best of them, like Sir
Richard Grenville, had the luck to die conspicuously, in their great
moments, and so to leave us an example of the spirit that defies odds,
and sets men above the fear of death. The rest led their men into
mad adventures, where they perished to the injury of their cause.
Most Englishmen can understand the pure joy of onset, the freedom of
the moment when everything has been given for the hope of winning
one objective; but it has been the more characteristic way of our
people--at any rate for the last five centuries--to double courage
with coolness, and fight not only their hardest but their best. From
Cressy to Waterloo, and from Mons to Arras, we have won many battles
by standing steadily and shooting the attack to pieces. Charges our
men have made, but under discipline and in the nick of opportunity.
The Black Prince charged fiercely at Poitiers; but it was only when he
had broken three attacks, and saw his chance to win. The charge of the
Worcesters at Gheluvelt, the charge of the Oxfords at Nonneboschen, and
a hundred more like them, were as desperate as any ‘ride of death’; but
they were neither reckless nor useless, they were simply the heroic
move to win the game. Still more is this the rule at sea. Beatty at
Jutland, like Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar, played an opening in
which he personally risked annihilation; but nothing was ever done with
greater coolness, or more admirable science. The perfect picture of all
courage is, perhaps, a great British war-ship in action; for there you
have, among a thousand men, one spirit of elation, of fearlessness, of
determination, backed by trained skill and a self-forgetful desire to
apply it in the critical moment. The submarine, and the anti-submarine
ship, trawler or patrol-boat are, on a smaller scale, equally perfect
examples; for there is no hour of their cruise when they are not within
call of the critical moment. In the trenches, in the air, in the fleet,
you will see the same steady skilful British courage almost universally
exemplified. But in the submarine war, the discipline needed is even
more absolute, the skill even more delicate, the ardour even more
continuous and self-forgetful; and all these demands are even more
completely fulfilled.
This is fortunate, and doubly fortunate; for the submarine war has
proved to be the main battlefield of our spiritual crusade, as well
as a vital military campaign. The men engaged in it have been marked
out by fate, as our champions in the contest of ideals. They are the
patterns and defenders of human nature in war, against those who
preach and practise barbarism. Here--and nowhere else so clearly as
here--the world has seen the death struggle between the two spirits
now contending for the future of mankind. Between the old chivalry,
and the new savagery, there can be no more truce; one of the two must
go under, and the barbarians knew it when they cried _Weltmacht oder
Niedergang_. Of the spirit of the German nation it is not necessary
to say much. Everything that could be charged against them has been
already proved, by their own words and actions. They have sunk without
warning women and children, doctors and nurses, neutrals and wounded
men, not by tens or hundreds but by thousands. They have publicly
rejoiced over these murders with medals and flags, with songs and
school holidays. They have not only broken the rules of international
law; they have with unparalleled cruelty, after sinking even neutral
ships, shot and drowned the crews in open boats, that they might
leave no trace of their crimes. The men who have done--and are still
doing--these things have courage of a kind. They face danger and
hardship to a certain point, though, by their own account, in the last
extreme they fail to show the dignity and sanity with which our own
men meet death. But their peculiar defect is not one of nerve, but
of spirit. They lack that instinct which, with all civilised races,
intervenes, even in the most violent moment of conflict or desperation,
and reminds the combatant that there are blows which it is not lawful
to strike in any circumstances whatever. This instinct--the religion
of all chivalrous peoples--is connected by some with humanity, by some
with courtesy, by ourselves with sport. In this matter we are all in
the right. The savage in conflict thinks of nothing but his own violent
will; the civilised and the chivalrous are always conscious of the fact
that there are other rights in the world beside their own. The humane
man forbears his enemy; the courteous man respects him, as one with
rights like his own; the man with the instinct of sport knows that
he must not snatch success by destroying the very game itself. The
civilised nation will not hack its way to victory through the ruins
of human life. It will be restrained, if by no other consideration,
yet at least by the recollection that it is but one member of a human
fellowship, and that the greatness of a part can never be achieved by
the corruption of the whole.
The German nature is not only devoid of this instinct, it is roused
to fury by the thought of it. Any act, however cruel and barbarous,
if only it tends to defeat the enemies of Germany, is a good deed, a
brave act, and to be commended. The German general who lays this down
is supported by the German professor who adds: ‘The spontaneous and
elementary hatred towards England is rooted in the deepest depths of
our own being--there, where considerations of reason do not count,
where the irrational, the instinct, alone dominates. We hate in the
English the hostile principle of our innermost and highest nature. And
it is well that we are fully aware of this, because we touch therein
the vital meaning of this War.’ Before the end comes, the barbarian
will find this hostile principle, and will hate it, in the French, the
Italians, the Americans--in the whole fellowship of nations against
which he is fighting with savage fury. But, to our satisfaction, he has
singled us out first; for, when we hear him, we too are conscious of a
spontaneous hatred in the depths of our being; and we see that in this
we do ‘touch the vital meaning of this War.’