Submarine Warfare of To-Day

by Charles William Domville-Fife

  Of these bases, which will be fully described in later chapters, there were about fifty, excluding the great dockyards and fleet headquarters, but inclusive of those situated overseas. When it is considered what a war base needs to make it an efficient rendezvous for some hundreds of ships and thousands of men, some idea of the gigantic task of organisation which their establishment, often in poorly equipped harbours and distant islands, required, not only in the first instance, but also with regard to maintenance and supplies, will be realised, perhaps, however, more fully when it is stated that the average ship needs a month spent in docking and overhauling at least once a year, and that the delicate and more speedy units of such a fleet need nearly four times that amount of attention.

  Headquarters Staff

  One of the first requisites of the auxiliary navy was the creation of a headquarters staff at the Admiralty, London. This was formed from naval officers of experience both in the regular service and in the two reserves (R.N.R. and R.N.V.R.).

  Forming an integral part of the great British or Allied armada, all operations were under the control of the Naval War Staff, but for purposes of more detailed organisation and administration additional departments were created which exercised direct jurisdiction over their respective fleets. The principal of these was known as the “Auxiliary Patrol Office,” under the Fourth Sea Lord and the Department of the Director of Minesweeping. These formed a part of the General Staff—if a military term is permissible—and both issued official publications periodically throughout the war, which served to keep the staffs of all the different war bases and the commanding officers of the thousands of ships informed as to current movements and ruses of the enemy.

  It is unnecessary to detail more closely the work of these departments, especially as much has yet to be said before plunging into the maelstrom of war. A sufficient indication of the colossal nature of the work they were called upon to perform will be found in a moment’s reflection of what the administration and control of such a large and nondescript fleet, spread over the world—from the White Sea to the East Indies—must have meant to the small staff allowed by the exigencies of an unparalleled war.

  Officers and Men

  The greatest problem in modern naval war is, undoubtedly, the supply of trained men. For this reason it has been left to the last to describe how the difficulty was faced and overcome by England and her oversea Dominions in 1914.

  Before doing so, however, it may be of interest to give here a few extracts from an excellent little official publication, showing how the British fleet was manned and expanded in bygone days of national peril1:

  “In time of war there has always been an intimate connection between the Royal Navy and the Merchant Service. Latterly, and more especially since the Russian War of 1854 to 1856, this fact tended to be forgotten, partly because men-of-war developed on particular lines and became far more unlike merchantmen than they had ever been before, and also because, by the introduction of continuous service, the personnel of the Navy seemed to have developed into a separate caste, distinguished by its associations, traditions and esprit de corps, as much by its special training and qualifications, from other seafaring men. This war has proved once again, to such as needed proof, that the two services cannot exist without each other, and that the Sea Power of the Empire is not its naval strength alone, but its maritime strength. Even at the risk of insisting on the obvious, it is necessary to repeat that, for an Island Empire, a war at sea cannot be won merely by the naval action which defeats the enemy; naval successes are of value for the fruit they bear, the chief of which is the power that they give to the victor to maintain his own sea-borne trade and to interrupt that of the enemy.

  “An elementary way of looking at the problems of manning the Royal Navy and the Merchant Service is to consider that there is in the country a common stock of seamen, on which both can draw. But this theory, like many others equally obvious and tempting, has the disadvantage that it leaves important factors out of account and, if worked out, results in an absurdity. Thus, shortly before war began there were in the country some 420,000 seamen, of whom one-third were in the Navy and two-thirds engaged in merchant ships and fishing vessels. There was no considerable body of unemployed seamen. During the war the personnel of the Navy was expanded to something like the 420,000 which represents the common stock of seamen. Therefore, if the theory met the case, there would have been no men left for the Merchant Service. But the merchant ships, in spite of difficulty and danger, continued to run, employing great numbers of men. And we must not forget to take into account the number of men, amounting to 48,000 killed and 4500 prisoners of war, who have been lost in the two services during the war. So it comes to this, that the common stock of seamen, or at least of men fit to man ships, has expanded during the war by more than 50 per cent. Whence came these extra men? Clearly for the most part from the non-seafaring classes.

  “The Navy in November, 1918, employed some 80,000 officers and men from the Merchant Service—viz. 20,000 R.N.R. ratings, 36,000 Trawler Reserve, and 20,000 mercantile seamen and firemen on Transport agreements, plus the officers. If the supposition, made in the absence of statistics, is correct that at this time the number of men in the Merchant Service itself had decreased proportionately to the loss of tonnage, it would seem that the Merchant Service needed no considerable inflow of men during the war. In other words, most of those added to the stock of seamen during the war must have gone into the Navy. This corresponds with known fact: the Navy has, in addition to the Reserve men already mentioned, nearly 200,000 men to demobilise in order to put its personnel on the footing on which it stood when war broke out.

  “It will be of interest to see how the personnel of the Navy expanded in former wars, and how at the peace it was invariably reduced to something like its pre-war figures. This can readily be done in tabular form:

  Naval Personnel (Numbers Voted)

  Year Name of War Before the War Maximum during War After the Peace

  1689 League of Augsberg 7,040 — —

  1697 — 40,000 —

  1700 — — 7,000

  1700 Spanish Succession 7,000 — —

  1712 — 40,000 —

  1713 — — 10,000

  1738 Austrian Succession 10,000 — —

  1748 — 40,000 —

  1759 — — 10,000

  1754 Seven Years’ War 10,000 — —

  1762 — 70,000 —

  1764 — — 16,000

  1775 American Independence 18,000 — —

  1783 — 110,000 —

  1785 — — 18,000

  1793 French Revolution 16,000 — —

  1801 — 135,000 —

  1803 — — 50,000

  1803 Napoleonic War 50,000 — —

  1812 — 145,000 —

  1817 — — 19,000

  1853 Russian War 45,500 — —

  1856 — 76,000 —

  1857 — — 53,000

  1914 The Present War 146,000 — —

  1918 — 450,000 —

  “It appears at once from these figures that the naval expansion during earlier wars was in most cases much greater proportionately than it has been in this. Roughly the personnel in this war has been multiplied by three; in earlier wars it was increased six, seven, eight, or even nine fold, if we take the difference between the figures for 1792 and 1812.

  “It is a common error to suppose that our ships in the old wars were manned entirely by seamen. A knowledge of how the men were raised shows that this cannot have been so; and confirmation can be had from a very brief study of ships’ muster books. Only about a third of the crew of a line-of-battle ship were, in the seaman’s phrase, ‘prime seamen.’ The rest were either only partly trained or were frankly not sailor men. The Victory at Trafalgar was not an ill-manned ship—here is an analysis of her crew: officers, commissioned and warrant, 28; petty officers, including marines, 63; able seamen, 213; ordinary seamen and boys, 225; landsmen, 86; marines, 137; a
rtificers, 18; quarter gunners, 12; supernumeraries and domestics, 37.

  “During the whole of our naval history down to 1815 it was the invariable rule that in peace time the battle fleets were laid up unmanned, and only enough ships were kept in commission to ‘show the flag’ and to police the sea. This accounts for the very large increase of the naval personnel which immediately became necessary when there was a threat of war; and it accounts also for the difficulty which was always experienced in raising the men. This difficulty was even greater than we are apt to suppose, for the Merchant Service has never been able to give the navy more than a fraction of the total number of men needed, and the machinery for raising extra men has, until this war, always been of a most primitive nature.

  “When war came the ships were commissioned, without crews. This could be done because from the latter part of the seventeenth century there was a permanent force of officers. Then the officers had to find their own crews. They began by drawing their proportion of marines, and then proceeded to invite seamen to volunteer. In this way they got a number of skilled seamen, men who had been in the navy before, and came back to it either as petty officers or in the hope of becoming so. Then warrants to impress seamen would be issued. Theoretically the impress was merely a form of conscription, the Crown claiming by prerogative the right to the services of its seafaring subjects. Practically a good deal of violence was at times necessary, as many of the men, preferring to sail in merchant ships, or wishing to wait for a proclamation of bounty, tried to avoid arrest. The scuffles that took place on these occasions gave the impress service a bad name, not altogether deserved, for real efforts were made to avoid hardship, and in any case the number of men raised in this way was greatly exaggerated by popular report.”

  There was no compulsion during the Great War to join any unit of the British fleet. Therefore all were either in the regular service, reservists or volunteers. The need was made known not only throughout the British Isles, but also from Vancouver to Cape Town, Sydney and Wellington, and men in all walks of life, but with either the Wander-Lust or true love of the wide open sea in their blood, rallied from all parts of the far-flung Empire to the call of the White Ensign.

  In order to obtain some 6000 officers and nearly 200,000 trained or semi-trained men, new sources of supply had to be tapped. Already the great battle fleets, brought up to full war strength and with adequate reserves, had absorbed nearly all the Reserve officers who could be spared from the food and troop transports.2

  British Official Photograph

  A Large and Heavily armed German Submarine of the Cruiser Type

  First came the great sea-training establishment of the Empire—the Mercantile Marine and its retired officers and men—already heavily depleted. Then the yacht clubs from the Fraser to the Thames and Clyde. Thousands of professionals and amateurs came overseas to the training cruisers and the “naval university,” Canada alone supplying several hundred officers.

  Doctors came from the hospitals and from lucrative private practices. The engineering professions and trades supplied the technical staffs and skilled mechanics. The great banks and city offices yielded the accountants, and the fishing and pleasure-boating communities, not only of Great Britain, but also of the Dominions and Colonies, yielded the men in tens of thousands. In this way the personnel of the new navy was completed in a very few months.

  Before passing on to describe, in the detail of personal acquaintance, the severe training of this naval force, a general knowledge of its heterogeneous character is necessary to enable the reader to understand this great assemblage of the sons of the Empire.

  In the smoke-filled wardroom and gunroom of the training cruiser, H.M.S. Hermione one windy March evening in 1916 there were some eighty officers of the auxiliary fleet, and of this number one hailed from distant Rhodesia, where he was the owner of thousands of acres of land and a goodly herd of cattle, but who, some time in the past, had rounded the Horn in a wind-jammer and taken sights in the “Roaring Forties.” Another was a seascape painter of renown both in England and the United States. A third was a member of a Pacific coast yacht club. A fourth was the son of an Irish peer, the owner of a steam yacht. Then came a London journalist, a barrister, a solicitor and a New Zealand yachtsman, while sitting at the table was a famous traveller and a pukka commander.

  In the neighbouring gunroom, among the crowd of sub-lieutenants—all of the same great force, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve—was a grey-haired veteran from the Canadian Lakes, a youngster from the Clyde, the son of a shipowner from Australia and a bronzed mine manager from the Witwatersrand.

  Among the engineers and mechanics the same diversity. Men from several of the great engineering establishments, a student from a North Country university, electrical engineers from the power stations and mechanics from the bench, with here and there one or two with sea-going experience.

  In the forecastle and elsewhere about the old cruiser—now merely a training establishment—were sailors with years of experience in both sail and steam. Fishermen from the Hebrides and Newfoundland rubbing shoulders with yacht hands from the Solent and Clyde.

  From this curiously mixed but excellent raw material a naval personnel, with its essential knowledge and discipline, had to be fashioned in record time by an incredibly small staff of commissioned and warrant officers of the permanent service, aided by the more experienced amateurs.

  It must, however, not be thought from this that the amateur was converted into a professional seaman in the space of a week or two. Three months of specialised training enabled them to take their place in the new fleet, but with some it required a much longer period to enable them to feel that perfect self-confidence when alone in the face of difficulties and dangers which is the true heritage of the sea.

  To describe here the training of officers and men would be to repeat what will be more fully and personally described in succeeding chapters. It is sufficient to say that the aim was to bring them all to a predetermined standard of efficiency, which would enable the officers to command ships of specific types at sea and in action, and the men to form efficient engineers and deck hands for almost any ship in the Navy.

  The medical branches naturally required no special training and the accountants merely a knowledge of naval systems of financial and general administration. These two branches had their own training establishments.

  When the period of preliminary training in the cruiser Hermione was over the officers were passed on to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, and from there to one or other of the fifty war bases in the United Kingdom, the Mediterranean or farther afield. Their appointments were to ships forming the fleets attached to each of these bases and generally operating in the surrounding seas.

  In this way the whole zone of war was covered by an anti-submarine and minesweeping organisation and general naval patrol, which operated in conjunction with, but separate from, the battle fleets, squadrons and flotillas, which were thus left free to perform their true functions in big naval engagements.

  CHAPTER II

  The New Navy—Training an Anti-Submarine Force

  Having described the raison d’être of the new navy, and how it became a fleet in being, with its own admirals, captains, staffs, bases and all the paraphernalia of war, I can pass on to a more intimate description of the training of the officers and men, preparatory to their being drafted to the scattered units of this great anti-submarine force.

  Lying in the spacious docks at Southampton was the old 4000-ton cruiser Hermione, which had been brought round from her natural base in Portsmouth dockyard to act as the depot ship and training establishment for a large section of this new force. Not all the officers and men of the auxiliary fleet were, however, destined to pass across its decks. This vessel was reserved for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, from which a very considerable proportion of the entire personnel of the new fleet was drawn. Nor was H.M.S. Hermione the first depot ship of the war-time R.N.V.R. at Southampton, fo
r the Admiralty yacht Resource II. had been used for the first few drafts, but was unfortunately burned to the water’s edge. There were also other vessels and establishments at Portsmouth, Devonport and Chatham. These were, however, mainly for the reception and brief training of the more experienced Merchant Service officers, entered in the Royal Naval Reserve for the duration of the war, and for the surgeons and accountants.

  The men of the new force were mostly trained in the naval barracks and depot ships situated at the big naval centres, such as Portsmouth and Chatham. After a few weeks all these establishments were drafting, in a constant stream, the trained human element to the vessels awaiting full complements at the different war bases, or being constructed in the hundreds of shipyards of the Empire.

  About H.M.S. Hermione, which has been selected as being representative of the training depots of a large section of the auxiliary service, little need be said, beyond the fact that she was commanded, first, by a distinguished officer from the Dardanelles, and subsequently by an equally capable officer, who, by the irony of fate, had in pre-war times been a member of the British Naval Mission to the Turkish navy—both of them men whose experience and unfailing tact contributed largely to the success of the thousands of embryo officers trained under their command.

  The ship herself was a rambling old cruiser, but very little of the actual training was carried out on board. Spacious buildings on the quayside provided the training grounds for gunnery, drill, signalling, engineering and all the complicated curricula, of which more anon. Lying in the still waters of the dock, alongside the comparatively big grey cruiser, were the trim little hulls of a numerous flotilla of 20-knot motor launches, newly arrived from Canada, with wicked-looking 13-pounder high-angle guns, stumpy torpedo-boat masts and brand-new White Ensigns and brass-bound decks. These were the advance guard of a fleet of over 500 similar craft, to the command of which many of the officers being trained would, after a period of practical experience at sea, eventually succeed.