I
Facing each other across the southern part of the North Sea were the
opposing submarine bases of Harwich and Flanders. The boats from these
bases occasionally met and fought, but in the main their duties lay
well apart. Harwich boats worked off the Bight, while the Flanders
ports were bases for U-boats to start from on their way down channel to
the traffic routes. The losses of the Flanders boats were heavy--so
were the losses of the VIIIth Flotilla at Harwich, especially in 1916.
In that year the VIIIth Flotilla submarine officers passed a
self-denying ordinance to reduce their consumption of alcohol. (Now
what I am leading up to is a comparison of British and German
mentality, because I think the question of personnel to be infinitely
more important than that of material.) The fact is, that heavy losses
do affect those who are left to carry on the work. A boat comes back to
harbour with her officers and crew tired and glad to be home again;
they are perhaps met with, "Did you see anything of Seventy-six? He's
been overdue three days. He was next to you--off Ameland. You didn't
hear anything go up? Oh, well, you'll probably have that billet next
week and you may find out...."
Well, it _does_ affect people, and there is undoubtedly a great feeling
of relief at getting back to harbour safely. In the Navy, where wines
and spirits are free of duty, alcohol is cheap and obtainable, and
alcohol is a relief from worry and an opiate for tired nerves. But
the war has never seen a case of disciplinary action being necessary
to control our submarine officers. It is a difficult question to
approach in print, as the temperance argument seems to call out such
strongly-expressed opinions from the advocates pro and con; but while I
have no idea of holding up submarine officers as paragons of abstinence
(for I hardly know any who are teetotallers), there is no doubt that
they fully realised that only moderation could keep them efficient for
war.
Over in Flanders it was the rule for U-boats to base at Bruges, and
to use only Ostend and Zeebrugge as they passed through on their way
to and from the sea. At Bruges the U-boat officers had a mess at
the house of M. Catulle--a large, well-furnished, and comfortable
building near the docks. There the officers had made the cellars
(three inter-connected vaults) into an underground Rest for Tired
Workers. All around the walls are painted frescoes illustrating the
minds of the patrons. The frescoes are over two feet in depth, and
are well executed in the type of German humour one meets in the Berlin
comic papers. There are mines, projectiles, etc., with the conventional
faces and hats of John Bull, France, and other Allies; dancing with
the mines are torpedoes, some of which carry on them the faces of dead
U-boat officers. Beneath the frescoes are mottoes--such as, "Drink,
for to-morrow you may die"--"Life is short, and you'll be a long time
dead." Between the pictures are smaller paintings of monkeys drinking
champagne.
After dinner, according to witnesses, the officers would retire to
these cellars and drink. There is little ventilation, and the
atmosphere must have been fairly thick with smoke and fumes. Drinking
sometimes continued till 8 A.M.--a horrible hour at which to
be drunk. It is reported by Belgians that the officers got through four
thousand bottles of wine in three weeks. Taking the high estimate of an
average of twenty officers always present, this means ten bottles per
head a day--which is absurd. It is probable, however, that the
competitors broke or gave away a good many bottles. But there is no
doubt they went at it pretty fast; one officer was drunk and incapable
for five days on end, and (as apparently there was considered to be a
limit of four days for states of coma) on the fifth day was ordered to
sea by the Captain of the Flotilla "to cool his head." The whole
impression one gets from the local stories is one of fear, morbid
excitement, and drink. The pictures conjured up are unpleasant: the
early morning scene in the cellars when a few hiccoughing stalwarts
still sat over their wine--the guttural attempt at song--the pale glow
of electric lamps through swirling smoke--the reek of alcohol--the
litter of bottles--and the frightened face of the Belgian chambermaid
peering round the angle of the cellar stairs. "_Karl and Schmidt have
not returned--God punish the English! Open more bottles, fool, and let
us forget that our turn is coming!_"
How the flotillas were able to do efficient work at all is a puzzle;
but the Flanders Flotillas did the Allies a lot of harm. Had it not
been the custom of the officers to throw off restraint in harbour, we
might have suffered a good deal more--how much more only a student of
psychology can guess. But there is no doubt of this--and a comparison
of the Harwich and Flanders Flotillas shows it--the British take to
games to soothe their nerves and the Germans to drink.
It is possibly something to do with this trait that brought the major
part of the U-boat successes into the hands of a few special officers.
The greater part of the captains did little; a few "aces" compiled huge
lists of sunken tonnage to their credit (or otherwise). Judged by
British Admiralty standards of efficiency, those few are the only ones
who in our Service would have been retained at all.
However, it is time I went on with the doings of our own boats. Human
beings are so much more important in war than are machines, that it is
a temptation to describe them for preference. I would like to be able
to talk about the submarine seamen also, but there is no ground for
comparison between our own men and the German machine-made U-boat hand.
One thinks of the German men as just things that opened or closed
valves when barked at, and who never took any interest in what was
going on outside their particular stations, or in what the boat was
doing. Our sailors are--well, to put it "socially," they seem to belong
more to the middle than the lower class. They are certainly not
machine-made or dull, and they are not reluctant to act according to
their own judgment in the absence of an officer's orders.
During the war our submarines sank 54 enemy warships and 274 other
vessels. These figures do not, of course, include the many warships
which were damaged but which were got back into harbour, although they
include the U-boats which our submarines destroyed. German ships are
very well subdivided in compartments and take a lot of killing.
Certainly on a modern war-vessel one torpedo-hit is very little use;
it takes about four to make certain of sinking her. The _Moltke_
(battle-cruiser) was hit with one torpedo forward in the Baltic by
Commander Laurence, and again off Hiorn's Reef by Lieutenant Allen
(right aft this time); on each occasion she got home safely. Our own
light cruiser _Falmouth_ had to receive four torpedoes in succession
before she sank. The _Prinz Adalbert_ was torpedoed by Commander Horton
in the Baltic off Cape Kola and returned safely to Kiel (she could not
take a hint, however, and after a long interval for repair she went
east again and met Commander Goodheart of "E 8," who sank her).
Commander Laurence in "J 1" hit the _Kronprinz_ and _Grosser Kurfurst_
(battleships) in the North Sea, but both were got home safely. Our
later submarines were fitted with larger torpedoes and tubes, but the
boats fitted with eighteen-inch torpedoes made up the larger part of
our flotillas, and it was realised by both our own and the enemy
submarines that it took several hits with the smaller-size weapon to
finish off a large ship. Perhaps the clearest case on record is that of
the _Marlborough_, the ship being hit by a torpedo at the Jutland
battle and remaining in the line at the Fleet speed and continuing her
firing as if she had never been touched. Older ships, as both sides
found to their cost, were much more vulnerable. Probably the Turkish
ships were the easiest of all to put down, as it is doubtful if their
fatalistic officers troubled to keep the watertight doors closed.
It must be remembered that there is all the difference in the world
between a practice and a war attack. The war attack is usually
unexpected, and is done under conditions of light and weather which
make things chancy, to say the least of it. In a practice attack an
officer can afterwards usually plot on the chart for you every movement
his boat and the enemy made, and give reasons for all orders he gave.
After a war attack he would probably only be able to remember clearly
such things as the periscope hoisting gear giving trouble and the
hydroplane men appearing to be unaccountably deaf. I have mixed up
several boats' attacks in the following description, and it would not
be far wrong as an account of more.