by Deborah Lake
Steered for steamer Stella from Ejsberg . . . Crew had already abandoned the ship. In passing, fired one torpedo at 500 metres, set for a depth of 5 metres which went under the target. Blinker signal to Bremse; sink by gun fire as Brummer has used a lot of ammunition.
A steamer, apparently a trawler, escapes. All ships of the convoy are afire or sinking. Entire convoy except for one trawler destroyed. Rescue work left to the ships’ boats and the escaped steamer as position probably reported to the enemy via wireless. In addition, Bremse had reported a submarine in sight.
Neither Fox nor Brooke hesitated for a single moment to confront two vastly superior ships, each four times their own size. Mary Rose had an additional handicap. Neither her range nor deflection transmitters worked. Despite this, both ships sailed into battle to uphold the Royal Navy’s long and gallant tradition of fighting no matter how high the odds against them. The Admiralty had issued no orders to destroyer escorts should they be attacked by superior forces. Lacking instructions, the two destroyer captains engaged the enemy. The official historian, Sir Henry Newbolt, observed with some acidity that: ‘Little can be done if two destroyers and a number of unarmed merchantmen are attacked by two powerful cruisers; and still less is likely to be done if the contingency has never been considered or discussed. The incident proved, moreover, that if the Germans decided to raid the Scandinavian route with surface ships, it would be very difficult to stop them.’ To add certain insult to definite injury, the Royal Navy failed even to glimpse Brummer and Bremse on their return journey.
The Admiralty were not pleased. Neither were the War Cabinet. Jellicoe, acting the part of a Job’s comforter, solemnly assured the Prime Minister that the incident was ‘the first occasion on which neutral ships had been sunk by surface craft without taking off the crews, which was a most serious breach of International Law’. Lloyd George was not impressed.
The convoy system continued to show results. Monthly tonnage losses in November reached just over 300,000 tons. Of this total, more than half was lost in the Mediterranean. In December, overall losses rose to about 400,000 tons, 50 per cent in the Mediterranean theatre. As with all tonnage figures, doubt arises. Some losses were quoted in gross tonnage, others in deadweight and some in net weight. As a general rule, totals from various sources can differ by about 50,000 tons per month.
In Britain, despite the improvement, the civilian population felt increased hunger pains. Shipping space remained at a premium. The need to transport and supply the US Army in France was the new priority.
The High Seas Fleet now had five U-boat flotillas. Flottille I was at Brunsbüttelkoog, at the mouth of the Elbe, with Flottille II at Wilhelmshaven. Emden was the base for Flottille III and Flottille IV. A new Flottille V, formed in September 1917, took up residence at Bremerhaven. As 1918 crept closer, U-boat construction slightly outpaced destruction.
With the collapse of Russia on the Eastern Front, Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided that a land victory was, after all, a possibility. The U-boat became even more important. The blow against the Allies in the west must be delivered before the Americans played a real part in the war. In December 1917, a massive programme of new U-boat construction received approval. Twelve U Class, thirty-six UB III, thirty-four UC III minelayers and twenty small UF boats, a new type for coastal defence. The programme brought the total number of boats ordered in 1917 to 273. As the Allies destroyed only sixty-three boats during the year, thirty-two of which were UC Class, the future held a certain bleakness for Allied shipping – provided only that growing unrest, increasing raw material shortages, hostile workers and demands from the Army did not ruin the construction programme.
On 12 December, German surface ships struck again. The eight destroyers of II Torpedobootflottille left their Wilhelmshaven base with damage in mind. G101, G103, G104 and V100 raced north towards Bergen. The others headed for the British coast to attack merchantmen gathering for the Scandinavian run.
Off the Norwegian coast, a British-bound convoy fought its way through a stiff north-westerly wind, with rain squalls and heavy seas. At 1200hr, the German destroyers ravaged the six merchantmen, two destroyers and four armed trawlers. The destroyers, HMS Partridge and HMS Pellew, had no answer to superior German gunnery. Help to the west, in the form of two cruisers and four destroyers from the Grand Fleet, was too far away.
Lieutenant Commander Reginald Hugh Ransome and the crew of Partridge fought desperately to no avail. Their ship was swiftly reduced to a floating, powerless target. Three torpedoes ripped into her during the fight. She sank within thirty minutes after a display of remarkable courage. Pellew, captained by Lieutenant Commander James Robert Carnegie Cavendish, crawled away, one engine out of action, into a providential rain belt. She was the sole survivor among the convoy and its escorts.
All four German destroyers returned safely to base. The remainder of the flotilla had had only slim pickings around the Northumberland coast. They sank two lone merchant ships and a fishing trawler.
In December 1917, as Christmas Day approached, Geddes struck. He informed Jellicoe, in writing, that he ‘had come to the conclusion that a change is desirable in the post of First Sea Lord’.
Jellicoe responded with dignity. ‘You do not assign a reason for your action,’ he wrote, ‘but I assume that it is due to a want of confidence in me.’ He would, he continued, ‘be glad to be relieved as soon as possible’. Sir Rosslyn Wemyss took over as First Sea Lord.
Jellicoe’s sacking caused controversy throughout the Royal Navy. Arguments raged. Some muttered of resignation but Jellicoe squashed such thoughts. He had borne major responsibility as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet or as First Sea Lord since the war began. He may have dragged his feet on the convoy issue, although, in truth, there was little evidence to show that they would work. He certainly preferred an offensive against the U-boats rather than defending merchant shipping from attack. Like many naval officers, he found it hard to grasp the idea that the number of U-boats sunk was totally immaterial to the battle. What really mattered was protection. The wolves may roam through the forest as much as they like; if they cannot reach the sheep, their presence means little.
With Jellicoe out of the way, Wemyss lost no time in removing the obdurate Sir Reginald Bacon from the Dover Patrol. Bacon was a Jellicoe man; there was no room for supporters of the admiral in positions where they could obstruct the new regime. In his place came Keyes.
The move pleased Lloyd George. Keyes was a thruster, the very man to carry through the long-proposed assault on the North Sea ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. Jellicoe and Bacon, in Lloyd George’s view, had dragged their feet on the issue. Like Prime Ministers before and after him, Lloyd George was a fire-eater from the safety of Downing Street.
The Admiralty and the War Cabinet were obsessed with the menace of Zeebrugge. Intelligence reports over-egged the pudding to confirm the importance of the Kapersnest, the Pirates’ Lair, on the Belgian coast. In fact, the Flanders Flotilla, brave and dedicated as it was, accounted for only one-third of the ships sunk in the U-boat offensive. Most Zeebrugge boats were the smaller coastal vessels. The real troublemakers were the deep-water U-boats. They lived in even bigger pirate lairs but those targets presented formidable problems.
The introduction of convoys, allied with the almost universal adoption of torpedo attacks instead of ‘stop, search, scuttle’, effectively ended the role of the Q-ship. Flower Class sloops and PQ Class patrol boats gave up independent roaming to become convoy sloops, positioned at the head, tail or sides of a convoy in the hope that an unsuspecting U-boat would attack them. By January 1918, the Admiralty decreed that they were no longer decoy vessels but were to be treated as ordinary sloops or patrol boats.
By February 1918, Bayly’s fleet of decoys at Queenstown had shrunk to three vessels. All were small ships, none over 750 tons. At Lowestoft, Granton and elsewhere, the same applied. Chances of trapping a lone U-boat tumbled. The only hope was to ply the coastal waters. And if
Vice-Admiral Charles Dare, commanding at Milford Haven, had his way, even that would vanish. He decided that the solution was to disband the hunting patrols and escort everything from coastal steamers to ships sailing to join a convoy. He explained this ‘method would have at least one great advantage, in that a submarine would be compelled to attack within reach of a vessel capable of active retaliation. With the present system of patrols this is not the case: the enemy can, with the greatest ease, evade them, and only attack a merchant ship when they are absent.’
The admiral put the case for convoys into a nutshell. It had taken more than three years of war but the light had dawned. Without waiting for approval, he put his precepts into action on 1 December 1917. During the month, his ships escorted twelve convoys, a total of seventy-four ships, without a single loss. It took another six months for the system to be adopted for coastal waters. Some admirals preferred hunting with hounds.
In January 1918, Allied tonnage losses were 303,608 tons. In February, it rose slightly to 305,509. March saw a total of 320,708 tons lost. In January, only 33 U-boats went to sea; the total strength was 132. In February, of 129 boats in commission, 50 boats went on patrol.
By April 1918, some could see that, for all practical purposes, the U-boat war was won. April shipping losses fell below 300,000 tons. Further, new construction of merchant ships exceeded the losses for the first time since February 1917. For the rest of the year, losses would never outpace the building programme. Indeed, they would only once again exceed 300,000 tons, in August 1918.
April 1918 also saw the assaults on Zeebrugge and Ostend. Although the raids failed in the simple sense that neither port was put out of action, they became a triumph for British propaganda. A war-weary public, rationed in essential foodstuffs, readily swallowed the revelation that Keyes and the Dover Patrol had put the Flanders bases permanently out of action. Probably only unrelieved, unmitigated disaster would have stopped the Zeebrugge and Ostend raids being presented as enormous victories. That the attacks did nothing to reduce the work of the Flanders boats was carefully ignored.
U-boat tactics changed. Not only did they seek prey in coastal waters. Night attacks became more frequent.
In May 1918, the U-boat Flottillenadmiral of the High Seas Fleet, Kapitän zur See Andreas Michelsen, tried a fresh ploy. The idea was not new. His predecessor, Hermann Bauer, had proposed it a year earlier. Bauer’s scheme was that several U-boats should act in concert. One of the big U-boat cruisers could be converted to act as a command U-boat. On board, a flotilla commander would use wireless to coordinate attacks by several boats on a convoy.
Michelsen decided against a flotilla leader in a command U-boat. It is surprising that it had taken twelve months for the U-boat command to come up with any suggestion to attack the increasingly successful convoys effectively.
On 10 May 1918, the operation, which lasted until 25 May, began in spasmodic fashion. Room 40 at the Admiralty identified several boats in the area of the Western Approaches. When the ‘concentration’ started, no less than nine convoys were in the area. Four boats lay in their path. None attacked. The next day, U 86 managed to sink the San Andres, a 2,500-gross-tonnage steamer of the Thoresen Line on passage to Bristol. Apart from this single effort, the U-boats let the convoys pass.
Five boats – U 43, U 70, U 92, U 103 and UB 72 – took advantage of the night to congregate near the entrance to St George’s Channel. Shortly before 0400 on 12 May, the RMS Olympic, sister to Titanic, saw a U-boat on the surface. Crammed with American soldiers, on her twenty-second troop-carrying trip across the Atlantic, Olympic’s bridge reacted quickly. The lookout on U 103 had no chance to react to the darkened shape hurtling towards him. The steel bow of the liner cut into the U-boat at full speed. Ten of Kapitänleutnant Claus Rücker’s crew died. He survived along with thirty-four others.
Less than sixty minutes later, Oberleutnant zur See Friedrich Träger and UB 72 in Lyme Bay were struck by a torpedo from the submarine D4. Thirty-four men died. The British surfaced to pick up three survivors, retching in oil-heavy sea.
UB 72’s patrol had not been a happy one. On her way to the rendezvous, she ran the gauntlet of three depth charges dropped from an airship, twenty-three from a destroyer, one of which caused an oil leak that gave away her position the next morning, when a further twenty depth charges exploded near her. Shaking off that pursuit, she then suffered a further attack from a patrol boat that dropped a further five charges.
The disappointments continued. By the end of the concentration, only five ships fell victim out of a total of 298 escorted ships. By the end of the month, fourteen boats had been destroyed. Ten replacements arrived but the effectiveness of the U-boat arm declined. Efficiency fell because too many inexperienced crews now went to sea. Despite Allied claims that morale was low, prisoner interrogations show little sign of it.
In one specific area, the U-boats had a new enemy to face. Air power had arrived in the shape of aeroplanes and airships. They were not U-boat killers. The de Havilland 6, rescued from oblivion as a disastrous training aircraft, enjoyed various nicknames. These included ‘the Clutching Hand’, ‘the Clockwork Mouse’, ‘the Dung Hunter’, ‘the Sky Hook’ and ‘the Chummy Hearse’. Underpowered, slow, it carried a pathetic load of four 25lb bombs, provided the observer remained on the ground. Pilots who flew the version with the American Curtiss OX-5 engine became accustomed to a spluttering, followed by a silence broken only by the gentle sound of a windmilling propeller. The aeroplane invariably obeyed the laws of flight to descend, more or less gracefully, to the waves below. One compensation for this unfortunate habit was that the DH 6 made an excellent boat and floated for long periods.
Flying boats became more worrying opponents. By 1917, the 5-ton Felixstowe F2A, developed from the American Curtiss designs, could cover 2,000 square miles of ocean on its patrols from air stations at Felixstowe, Great Yarmouth and the Clyde. Armed with two 230lb bombs, and up to seven Lewis guns, the F2A was an ominous harbinger of future anti-submarine warfare. Before the conflict ended, flying boats claimed two airships, three U-boats and a clutch of German seaplane fighters as victims. The U-boats claims, at least, were wildly optimistic.
Airships had a much longer range with enormous value as convoy escorts. Slow and relatively peaceful, they maintained station for many hours.
Both airships and aircraft were sufficient to force a U-boat to dive, for both could bring destroyers with their hated Wasserbomben into the area.
And out on the sea, a handful of decoys still roamed.
SIXTEEN
BLUE SMOKE CAME OUT OF HER
Lieutenant Harold Auten, RNR, commander of HMS Stock Force, was below, drinking an afternoon cup of tea, when the torpedo hit his ship at almost exactly 1645hr on 30 July 1918.
Auten, the schoolboy who joined the dignified Peninsular & Oriental in 1908, spent the first year of the war at Devonport. Able to boast that he was on the staff of the Captain of the Dockyard, he served humdrum days as junior assistant to a commander. They spent hours on the unexciting task of arranging the fitting-out of armed trawlers.
This relatively placid existence abruptly ended in September 1915. Auten went as first lieutenant to Zylpha at Portsmouth. The 3,000-ton collier, one of Sir Lewis Bayly’s original Q-ships, came under the command of Lieutenant Commander John Kelty McLeod, RN. He and Auten, along with Campbell and others, transferred to Queenstown. Like many another Q-ship, Zylpha then spent months trailing her coat across the waters of the Irish Sea and the Western Approaches.
Other decoys engaged U-boats. Zylpha endured days and nights of long, uneventful patrols. The nearest she came to action was three months in Caribbean waters. Reports, nothing more than wild rumours in truth, reached the Admiralty that confirmed Whitehall’s worst fears: U-boats on station in the Mexican Gulf, ready to strike at tankers on the oil routes.
The Kaiserliche Marine had already shown that operations in American waters were possible. Only months earlier, Kapit�
�nleutnant Hans Rose with U 53 caused a sensation when he arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1916. The U-boat with some of her ballast tanks modified to carry extra fuel, made the journey on Scheer’s personal orders. The blockade runner and cargo U-boat, Bremen’s maiden voyage had been planned to reach America on 15 September 1916. The Royal Navy had sent a gaggle of warships to intercept Deutschland, her sister ship, on an earlier voyage. They failed, but Scheer reasonably anticipated that they would try again with Bremen. Rose had the job of spreading a little panic. He was to enter Newport harbour to show that Germany’s U-boats owned an exceedingly long and lethal reach.
As it happened, Bremen never reached America. She vanished. Nobody knows why or how. The Royal Navy also failed to arrive. Agitation in Washington persuaded them to stay clear.
U 53 found only merchant ships in her path. US Navy destroyers watched Rose sink five of them, three British, one Norwegian and one Dutch, outside US territorial waters. The Kapitänleutnant took great care to act absolutely in accordance with international law and the Prize Regulations. Nobody died.
Zylpha spent weeks looking for the mysterious rumoured U-boat. Auten himself claimed that the boat was an old one, purchased from an unnamed South American navy. Its new owner, allegedly pro-German, intended to produce apparently authentic film footage of sinking merchantmen.
After three months, the Q-ship returned home to the cold, green waters around Ireland. Finally, in April 1917, she met U 50 under the command of Kapitänleutnant Gerhard Berger. A torpedo swept by a few feet away after McLeod took evasive action. In the fight that followed, Zylpha was the target of some fifty-three shells, according to the bridge signalman who kept count. She at last opened fire at long range after the fiftieth shot. The decoy’s first two rounds fell short. The third and fourth shots produced smoke on the U-boat’s deck between the forward gun and the conning tower.