A Naval History of World War I

by Paul G. Halpern

  In September the Russians shifted from the traditional use of submarines against naval forces and sent the first submarines to sea with specific orders to operate against shipping between Germany and Sweden. The exact reasons are not clear, but were probably linked to the failure of the Germans to renew their offensive operations in the Gulf of Riga, the recall of ships from the High Sea Fleet to the North Sea, and the fact the Baltic was obviously returning to its status as a purely secondary theater for the Germans and a major German naval offensive need not be feared.49 It was, however, a Russian decision, and because the submarines were under Russian operational control, the Admiralty were not involved. This, as we shall see, had certain disadvantages from the diplomatic point of view.

  On 28 September E.8, E.19, and the Bars sailed on what appears to be the first of these patrols. By the time E.19 returned to Revel on 13 October, Cromie had sunk one ship in the western Baltic, driven another onto a reef (it was later salved by the Germans), and had a narrow escape from an antisubmarine net southwest of Bornholm. He then sank four more ships south of the Swedish Öland Island, drove another ship aground, and sent a Swedish ship, the Nike (1,800 tons) carrying iron ore to Germany, into Revel as a prize. Cromie had sunk all ships while surfaced, had been plagued by faulty torpedoes, and suffered from considerable diplomatic controversy regarding his activities. One ship, the Germania (1,900 tons), had tried to escape to Swedish waters, ran aground 2 miles off the Swedish coast, and was abandoned by her crew. Cromie tried unsuccessfully to tow her into deep waters and removed the ship’s papers and some fresh food. A controversy ensued over whether E.19 had continued firing at the ship after she was in Swedish waters and had set off an explosive charge in the engine room, which the British claimed was a boiler explosion. The ship was later salved by tugs and taken to Germany. The Russians, anxious to avoid unnecessary complications with Sweden, also released the Nike on the grounds that the 1909 Declaration of London had not listed ores as contraband. Of the other two boats on this first sortie, E.8 managed to sink only a single small ship off Stilo on the German coast, and the Akula had no luck off Libau. The permanent loss to the Germans was small, only six ships representing about 13,000 tons. By later standards in the war, particularly in the Mediterranean, it would be trifling. Nevertheless, in an area that represented their own back yard and where they had always enjoyed relative security, the losses were very disturbing. The operations also created thick dossiers in the foreign offices and admiralties as diplomats and admirals thrashed out the legal and diplomatic repercussions of what had happened.

  From 17 to 26 October, Horton in E.9 was at sea, primarily off the Swedish coast. He sank three ships, representing approximately 7,700 tons, in the vicinity of Norrköping Bay—a fourth ship failed to sink after her sea cocks were opened and drifted ashore where she was eventually salved. Horton sank his third ship in the presence of the Swedish destroyer Wale, rejecting the Swedish warship’s claim he was in territorial waters. In this same period, the Russian submarines Alligator and Kaiman each captured a ship in the Gulf of Bothnia. Russian torpedo boats captured another, although according to the German official history, it was later determined in 1918 that the three had been captured in Swedish territorial waters. The Russians supplemented these activities in the Gulf of Bothnia with a sweep by four cruisers and five destroyers on 28 October, which examined several neutral ships but captured only a single German. The Russians believed a substantial number of German ships loaded with iron ore had been kept in harbor by Swedish authorities after neutral captains warned them about the Russian cruisers. German shipping was able to make good use of Swedish territorial waters in the Gulf of Bothnia, usually venturing outside only at night. The Russians had scant success. A final raid by four Russian destroyers on the night of 21 December, shortly before ice ended operations for the year, failed to bag a single ship.

  Goodhart in E.8 scored one of the more spectacular successes of the submarine campaign while operating off Libau on 23 October. He encountered the recently repaired armored cruiser Prinz Adalbert escorted by two destroyers and torpedoed her. One of the cruiser’s magazines exploded, and there were only three survivors. It was the heaviest loss of the war for the German Baltic forces.

  At the end of October, Cromie and E.19 returned to the western Baltic and found targets scarce, but sank a 1,000-ton merchantman and on 7 November sank the German cruiser Undine. On a later cruise in deteriorating weather, he sank a 1,300-ton steamer west of Bornholm, the final success against German shipping for the year.

  For most of the war it had been the Germans who attacked Allied shipping. Now that the shoe was on the other foot and they themselves were the target, how did they react? The October submarine offensive in the Baltic caused considerable disruption to German trade. Shipping companies held their vessels in port, and ferries such as the Sassnitz-Trelleborg line ceased operations. Prince Heinrich recommended ships stay within Swedish territorial waters and, when they could not, proceed only by night. He repeated his prior request that the Baltic receive at least another torpedo boat flotilla and more trawlers. Once again he was told they could not be spared from the High Sea Fleet. The losses of October forced the Germans to reconsider, and on 25 October they transferred two small cruisers and two torpedo boat flotillas to the Baltic, thereby causing the High Sea Fleet to break off an operation in the Skaggerak and temporarily forego future sorties for lack of sufficient destroyers.50

  The Germans replied to the submarine menace much the same way the British and French had. They deployed their available light craft to patrol key routes, such as the coastal waters between Libau-Brüsterort-Jershöft and the sectors Jershöft-Sassnitz and Sassnitz-Trelleborg. They arranged for aircraft to patrol the coastline, and even experimented with U.66 towed behind and connected by phone to an innocent-looking vessel, ready to be cast off and attack a hostile submarine. The necessity for antisubmarine patrols also caused the Germans to draw back and weaken their forward line of patrols in the Baltic. The submarine alarm also involved the Germans in an incident with the Swedes. On 21 October the auxiliary patrol boat Meteor opened fire on an unidentified submarine in stormy weather southwest of Ystad. The submarine turned out to be the Swedish Hvalen proceeding in company with the repair ship Blenda. A Swedish sailor was mortally wounded before the Germans spotted the Swedish flag. The Swedish ships were apparently in Swedish territorial waters. The Swedes now had occasion to be as incensed with the Germans as they were with the Allies over the Germania. The Germans expressed their regrets and the incident, like that of the Danish submarine Havmanden less than two months before, demonstrated how very dangerous it was for neutral submarines to operate in the war zone.

  Prince Heinrich was as reluctant as many of the British and French admirals to form convoys, although they were proposed by some of the German shipping concerns. He replied that he did not have enough torpedo boats to escort convoys and that convoys presented a better target for submarines than individual ships. Moreover, ships proceeding with warships as escorts were liable to be torpedoed without warning. It was actually the Swedes who appear to have furnished the first convoys for their own shipping. At the beginning of November, Swedish warships escorted a dozen Swedish steamers from Landsort to Bornholm.51 Prince Heinrich, in contrast, established certain positions to be permanently occupied by torpedo boats. The most northerly was Häfringe-Landsort in Norrköping Bay off the Swedish coast. There was another area off the northern tip of Öland Island. Every twenty hours a pair of torpedo boats left Libau to patrol to Landsort, remained there eighteen hours, and then cruised southward to and along the east coast of Öland to Segerstad and then back across the Baltic to Libau. When possible, the passage across the Baltic was arranged to cover—but not directly convoy—merchant ships. Auxiliary patrol boats, sailing alone for the most part, secured the route along the German coast.52 The Germans, despite this extensive deployment, did not succeed in sinking a single submarine. Essentially, weather conditions had
ended submarine operations for the winter. On the other hand, the Germans could claim that their traffic resumed its normal proportions and that the Allies, despite the sinking of fourteen steamers (approximately 28,000 tons), had not succeeded in stopping the traffic in iron ore.

  The Russian mining offensive, which resumed with the long nights of autumn, also did not produce extensive results. On the night of 10–11 November, Rear Admiral Kerber with the dreadnoughts Petropavlovsk and Gangut and seven destroyers covered a minelaying expedition by four cruisers approximately 35 miles south of Gotland. Five submarines also were to be deployed to support the operation, but two (Gepard and E.8) collided, and the others reached their positions too late because of bad weather. Russian mines, however, claimed only one ship. The cruiser Danzig was badly damaged on the night of the 25th.

  The Russians also made use of their apparently excellent radio direction finding and radio intercept methods to establish the positions of the German patrols watching the minefields distributed on the line Östergarn-Lyserort. On the night of 19–20 November, seven Russian destroyers, led by the Novik, raided the German patrols near Spon Bank off Windau, sinking the auxiliary patrol boat Norburg and escaping before German cruisers and destroyers could arrive to assist. The Germans decided to abandon night patrols in the dangerous position off Windau, relying on strengthening their minefields for protection.

  In November the Russians attempted to adapt three of their submarines, the Akula, Bars, and Vepr, for minelaying. The apparatus was fairly primitive and required the submarine to surface to lay the mines. The Russians hoped to use the boats to mine the entrances to Pillau and Danzig, but on the first mission, a shorter run to the south of Libau that began on 27 November, the Akula disappeared. She was probably the victim of a German mine, but the Russians abandoned the attempt to use their submarines for minelaying.

  The final Russian mining operations for the year produced mixed results. On the early morning of 6 December, five cruisers, covered by the Petropavlovsk and Gangut, laid a field halfway between Hela and the southern tip of Gotland. The Russian success at radio interception enabled them to avoid a German minelaying expedition at work off Lyserort the same night. However, only the small cruiser Lübeck was damaged by the Russian field on 13 January. The far less ambitious operation in which three destroyers laid mines between Windau and Lyserort on the night of 15 December was more productive. The next morning the German cruiser Bremen and destroyer V.191 were sunk in the field, which also claimed on the 23d the destroyer S.177 and auxiliary patrol boat Freya.

  The year 1915 was probably the most active year of the war as far as naval operations in the Baltic were concerned. When ice ended operations until the following spring, the Russian navy could claim to have done fairly well, proportionately much better than the Russian army, although there was no comparison in the scale of the effort. Naturally, claims as to success or failure in the Baltic depended on who was doing the talking. The Germans could also claim that they had achieved their essential goals in what was for them a secondary theater. Nevertheless, it was the Russians who might be more hopeful when the campaigning season resumed with the thaw in 1916. They had the four new dreadnoughts in service, new large destroyers and submarines would also be forthcoming, and the British submarines might be able to repeat their success of October 1915. These hopes were destined to be disappointed.

  1916: MINE WARFARE PREDOMINANT

  Early in 1916 the War Committee in London examined the question of possible British aid to the Russians. Captain von Schoultz, the Russian observer with the Grand Fleet, had also proposed more effective cooperation between the Allies. Once again, the possibility of sending surface ships to the Baltic was dismissed as not practicable.53 There was the possibility of sending more submarines, as well as what the Russians termed a “timely, weighty and prolonged” demonstration against the Sound and Belts. The outlook for getting more submarines through the Sound was not good. The German mine and net defenses had made passage through the Belts impossible. As for the Sound, new German minefields had been laid since the British submarines passed through the preceding year and an Admiralty study concluded that with great good luck only half the submarines attempting the passage would get through, and if they were unlucky, the probability was all the submarines might be lost. A demonstration by surface ships posed even more difficulties. A fleet could not maintain itself in the narrow waters south of the Skaw without a base to refuel the vital small escort craft. Any serious attempt to force the Belts would have to be a combined naval and military operation, for the narrow passages would have to be occupied to protect the flanks and lines of communication. A military operation of this sort would probably provoke the German occupation of Jutland and would likely be a much larger operation than the Dardanelles. Unlike the Dardanelles, where the Allies had unquestioned naval supremacy, the operation would have to be carried out across the North Sea. Aside from the inevitable danger from submarines, the High Sea Fleet would be able to dash out to attack transports and ships inside the Skaw whenever the Grand Fleet withdrew to refuel.54

  In July 1916 the Admiralty finally decided to send more submarines, but not by way of the Sound. The four older C-class submarines (C.26, C.27, C.32, and C.35) would be towed around the North Cape to Archangel and then loaded on barges for the nearly 1,000-mile trip south via the rivers and canals of northern Russia to Petrograd and the Baltic. The British were forced to use the obsolescent C-class boats, for the newer E boats would have been too large to pass through the rivers and canals. The submarines and their tugs sailed on 3 August, and after an epic journey that was often a minor miracle of improvisation, they arrived safely at Petrograd on 9 September. Unfortunately, their batteries, which had been shipped separately, arrived late and with many cells damaged and useless due to poor packing. The British with great difficulty managed to get only C.32 and C.35 operational in time for just one patrol from their base at Rogokul in Moon Sound before winter and ice ended operations for the year.55

  When the 1916 spring thaw began somewhat earlier than usual at the beginning of April, the Russians set to work renewing their minefields in the “Central Position” and extending the minefields started in the “Forward Position.” They also worked to secure their situation in the Gulf of Riga, renewing the fields in the Irben Strait and improving their Moon Sound position. The Russians began construction of the powerful 30.5-cm batteries at Zerel on the Sworbe Peninsula, dominating the Irben minefields, and at Cape Tachkona, on the northern tip of Dagö Island, commanding the southern flank of the advanced position.

  The Germans, whose 1916 operations in the Baltic were essentially defensive, also made increasing use of mine warfare. They were, after the experience of 1915, reluctant to risk the modern heavy units of the High Sea Fleet on secondary tasks in the Baltic, and the relentless demands for manpower led them to lay up more and more of the old battleships and armored cruisers they had been using in the Baltic since the beginning of the war. Auxiliary patrol craft, armed minesweepers and trawlers, destroyers, and torpedo boats for the protection of merchant shipping were now the most important assets. The Germans were now weak in battle-worthy surface ships and therefore anxious to hamper the sorties of Russian cruisers into the central and southern Baltic. Consequently, they allotted 3,500 mines for minefields to be laid between the island of Dagö and the skerries off Stockholm on the Swedish coast.

  The German navy also deferred any offensive in the Gulf of Riga, which would probably require the capture of Ösel and the other islands, until the German army actually requested one. Prince Heinrich was anxious to take the islands but frustrated by the army’s lack of interest and the apparently lukewarm attitude of the Admiralstab, who were pressured by the new chief of the High Sea Fleet, Admiral Scheer, to follow a more aggressive policy in the North Sea. In 1916 the German army was preoccupied with the western front, notably their own offensive against Verdun and, later, defense against the British offensive on the Somme. On the
eastern front, they faced the problem of helping their Austrian ally repel the Brusilov offensive—the last serious and partially successful Russian effort of the war—and disposing of Romania, which belatedly entered the war on the side of the Entente.56

  Prince Heinrich turned the greater part of his attention to securing German shipping by manning and fitting out large numbers of small craft. He was also converted to the idea of convoys as the most effective method of protecting trade. He presented his proposals to a conference of German shipowners assembled in Lübeck and attempted to exert some pressure through the marine insurance companies, in the absence of legal means, to force shipowners to comply. German shipowners proved to be less enthusiastic. They were not happy with the delays involved in waiting for convoys to form, or the fact that ships were tied to the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy, and they worried about collisions. These were all familiar objections to convoys, expressed even more emphatically on the British side, and Prince Heinrich himself had shared some of these beliefs just a few months before.