ZEEBRUGGE
Carpenter, Captain A. F. B., The Blocking of Zeebrugge (1922). The best account by a participating officer, the Vindictive’s captain.
Pitt, Barrie, Zeebrugge (1958). An enthusiastic more recent retelling.
MISCELLANEOUS
AVIATION
Macintyre, Captain Donald, Wings of Neptune: the Story of Naval Aviation (1963).
Popham. Hugh, Into Wind: a History of British Naval Flying (1969). Both books cover the field ably and accurately.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, Jones, H A., The War in the Air, 6 vols. (1922-8). Raleigh responsible for vol. i only. This official history covers all aspects of its subject and is especially good on the early days of naval aviation.
Roskill, Captain Stephen (ed), Documents Relating to the Naval Air Service, vol i. 1908-18 (1969). This Navy Records Society volume, the first of a proposed two, does not lack for detail or comprehensiveness.
NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT AND ‘ROOM 40’
Ewing, Alfred W., The Man of Room 40: the Life of Sir Alfred Ewing (1939). A filial tribute.
James, Admiral Sir William, The Eyes of the Navy: a Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall (1955). American edition, The Code Breakers of Room 40 (1956). Lively, authorized.
SCAPA FLOW SCUTTLING
Reuter, Vice-Admiral Ludwig von, Scapa Flow: the Account of the Greatest Scuttling of all Time (1940). By the commander who carried it out.
van der Vat, Dan, The Grand Scuttle: the Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919 (1982). A comprehensive and entertaining account.
SHIPS
Hough, Richard, Dreadnought: a History of the Modem Battleship (1964). The emphasis on illustrations, diagrams, and statistics.
Marsh, Edgar J., British Destroyers (1966). Plans, statistics, photographs. authoritative text. Can never be superseded.
Parkes, Oscar, British Battleships (1957). The massive and definitive study of Royal Navy capital ships since the end of sail.
NB Issues ofJane’s Fighting Ships up to 1919 also relate, as does Breyer, Siegfried, Schlachtschiffe und Schlachtkreuzer (1970).
SUBMARINES AND U-BOATS
Bauer, Admiral Hermann, Reichsleitung und U-Bootseinatz, 1914-18 (1956). A notable German submariner’s invaluable history.
Carr. Lieutenant William G., By Guess and by God: the Story of the British Submarines in the War (1930). An entertaining, lightweight book on the great exploits.
Chatterton, E. Keble, Fighting the U-boats (1942). A comprehensive history of one great U-boat campaign published in the throes of a second.
Edwards, Lieutenant-Commander K., We Dive at Dawn (1939). A concise and useful history of the submarine and its exploits during the Great War.
Gibson. R. H., and Prendergast, Maurice, The German Submarine War, 1914-18 (1931).Comprehensive and invaluable.
Jameson, Rear-Admiral Sir William, The Most Formidable Thing (1965). Another submariner’s excellent account. Reliable and entertaining.
Extract from
Unheard, Unseen
by David Boyle
If you enjoyed The Great War at Sea by Richard Hough, you may be interested in Unheard, Unseen: Warfare in the Dardanelles by David Boyle, also published by Endeavour Press.
Prologue
The Dardanelles in the early hours of 27 April 1915. Here Agamemnon and the Greeks landed for the attack on Troy. Here Xerxes had ordered the sea to be lashed for destroying his invasion bridges. Here Lord Byron swam against the Hellespont current.
Now it was the very portals of the Ottoman Empire for the crew of the British submarine E14, staring silently into the darkness from the small conning tower, eight feet above the waves. It meant mines, forts, searchlights and wire submarine nets. It meant a formidable current pouring fresh water over strange and unpredictable layers of salt water up the 38 mile passage from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmora, and through one narrow point only three quarters of a mile wide. It meant undertaking possibly the longest dive ever contemplated in a submarine.
It also meant passing the wreckage of the submarines that had tried to pass that way in the days and weeks before: the French submarine Saphir and the British E15, lying wrecked and battered on a sandbank off Kephez Point, their dead buried on the beach, their survivors in captivity.
The sea was absolutely smooth and there was only a breath of air from the movement of the submarine itself. The canvas screens around the bridge had been removed to make the conning tower less visible. The electric batteries that would power their motors underwater had been charged to their highest pitch, as they waited in their harbour of Tenedos with its medieval castle, its windmills and its Greek sailing caiques, just a few miles from the site of ancient Troy.
E14 had weighed anchor at 1.40 in the morning. There was no escort for their lonely voyage. The goodbyes had been said. They had written their farewell letters and given them into safekeeping, knowing that the chances were now against their survival.
The submarine’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Courtney Boyle, had written three – to his wife, his parents and his solicitor – in the three hours warning he had been given at Mudros harbour the day before. Now he stood in his navy greatcoat, holding onto the rail, his binoculars around his neck, staring ahead in the blackness at the navigation lights of the allied warships, the greens and reds slipping away behind him. Next to him was his navigating officer, Lieutenant Reginald Lawrence, only 22 years old, a reserve officer from the merchant navy, who had been there just a year before in peacetime. Below, the executive officer, Edward Stanley, was supervising the control room, listening to the rhythmic pulse of the engines.
It was a flat calm and there was no moon. From the northern shore in the distance ahead of them came the boom of guns and the flash of high explosive, a reminder that British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops were now dug in on the beaches, after their dramatic and perilous landings 48 hours before. Closer to the invasion beaches, they could see the shimmer of tiny glows from the trenches, the cigarette ends and makeshift fires of the soldiers dug into the dunes.
On their left hand side, there was a huge searchlight by the Suan Dere river; Boyle’s first objective was to get as close as possible to the estuary there before diving. Beyond that, he could see searchlights on both shores, sweeping the sea ahead of them. He and Lawrence reckoned the one past the white cliffs on the southern shore must be Kephez Point, where E15 had come to grief and, further ahead, a more powerful yellow light, was the great fort at Chanak.
One diesel engine drove them ahead, and the noise and the fumes were horribly apparent to anyone on the conning tower, where the exhaust pipe was. Boyle was as experienced a submarine commander as any other afloat, but he was aware that he had not quite earned his commander’s confidence. The calculations about speed, battery endurance, current and all the rest had been going through his head constantly since the dramatic meeting in the fleet flagship just two weeks before when – like all but one in the room – he had judged the venture impossible. That single dissenting voice was now dead.
He was aware also that, if the commander of E15 had not declared the passage of the Dardanelles possible by submarine, then almost certainly – as the most senior commander present – he would have been asked to try anyway. The one ray of hope was that the Australian submarine AE2, under the command of Henry Stoker, had now signalled that they had got through. This news had reached the E14 immediately before their departure and had changed the mood of the crew from resigned acceptance to hopeful elation. The passage of the Dardanelles must be possible after all, even if it remained extraordinarily hazardous.
But Boyle did have a plan. It was to get as far as possible to conserve their battery before diving, to dive as deep as possible under the obstructions, but to rise to periscope depth as often as possible in the most difficult sections of the journey, where the current was most unpredictable, to make sure the submarine did not drift He was acutely aware that his own skill and ex
perience was now the determining factor, above all others, in his survival, the survival of the other 29 men on board, and of course of the success or otherwise of the mission.
They passed a brightly lit hospital ship, with its red crosses illuminated under spotlights, and then they were alone at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The crew were sent below and the engine room hatch was closed as a precaution. The Suan Dere searchlight loomed ahead, swept over them and then came back. Had they been seen? It flashed away again. It was clear from the experience of the ancient trawlers the British were using as minesweepers that the batteries ignored small ships on the way up the Dardanelles, waiting for them to drift closer to the shore as they turned back before firing. It was not clear, however, how much the stripped down conning tower was visible.
Then the searchlight was back and this time it stayed on them for 30 seconds. Lawrence gave a strained laugh. They had been seen. Boyle sent Lawrence below and ordered diving stations. By the time the hatch had been shut behind them, and they had swept down the iron ladder into the control room, two shots been fired. Lawrence settled down with his notebook in the control room. “Now we had really started on our long dive,” he wrote later.
Everything now depended on the captain’s skill and the resources of their electric batteries to drive them underwater.
I
“ Underhand, unfair and damned un-English.”
The definition of submarines articulated by Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson in 1901.
We forget these days, when technology moves so slowly – I have been travelling on jumbo jets now for almost four decades – just how fast technological change was racing ahead a century ago. So fast, in fact, that the pioneers of motor transport, aviation and cinematography in the 1890s and 1900s often lived to see their full fruition in the 1960s. It was the same with submarines.
When the French navy ordered their first submarines at the turn of the twentieth century, it was almost inevitable that their sceptical British opposite numbers would do so too – even though official naval policy was to shun submarines. The First Sea Lord joked that they would hang submariners as pirates if they were captured. In April 1901, the House of Commons was told that the Royal Navy was ordering five submarines, designed by the Irish American submarine pioneer John Philip Holland, in order to “assess them”.
So it was that the first five submarines, the Holland class, joined the Royal Navy. There was the usual confusion with new technology about what kind of skills would be needed to make it work. It occurred to Reginald Bacon, described once as “the cleverest man in the navy”, that what they really needed was a series of enthusiastic torpedo experts from the so-called electrical branch. He therefore applied for the position of Inspecting Captain of Submarines, and got the job:
“I knew nothing about submarines; nor did anyone else, so the first thing to do was to sit down and think out where the difficulties were that we were likely to come across and arrived at methods by which they might be forestalled. The result was rather peculiar; for all the problems that I originally considered to be likely to be difficult turned out to be simple, and several of those that appeared to be simple gave, in the end, an infinity of trouble.”
The new submarines were 63 foot long, as long as a cricket pitch, and full of levers. There were complex experiments about crews breathing the same air for long periods of time. In case of poisonous fumes, which remained a serious danger from the accidental combination of batteries and seawater, a small cage of white mice was provided and the crew of eight kept a close eye on their behaviour whenever they dived.
The new submarine service attracted officers and ratings who had just got married, or planned to be, and needed the extra pay – submarine pay was almost twice that of those in the conventional navy – and because there was less discipline. The service was always more idiosyncratic than the regular naval life, and attracted those who were most thrilled by technology: many of the first submarine commanders – Courtney Boyle included – owned motorcycles and enjoyed riding them fast. Submarine officers dressed in a bizarre mixture of wing collars, monkey jackets and sea boots (one submarine captain greeted a visiting admiral in carpet slippers in 1914). They attracted the mavericks who enjoyed the disapproval of the naval old guard, led by the abrasive Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, known to the ranks as Old ‘ard ‘eart. The very classlessness of the submarines, with only maybe a curtain between the officers and other ranks, made the old salts nervous.
By 1904, Bacon had created the bones of the new service, with an ancient cruiser called Thames moored out of the way – where their presence would not offend the old guard – at the end of Fareham Creek, near Portsmouth. It was surrounded by the new classes of tiny British-built submarines, the A class and B class. It was there that many of the famous British submarine pioneers were sent for their training, including Max Horton, Martin Nasmith, Godfrey Herbert, Archibald Cochrane, Ferdinand Feilmann, Charles Little, and Charles Brodie (known by his initials C. G.). It was Horton who would later start the submarine tradition of flying a skull and crossbones, as an ironic dig at their critics in the respectable navy.
Brodie and Horton fell heavily against the fore torpedo tubes on their first dive in a Holland submarine, unaware that they had to hold on. By then, the submarine service had suffered the first of many tragic disappearances. The first British-built submarine, A1, was lost with all hands by Nab Tower in the Solent during a dive in 1904, hit by a mail steamer while submerged. The submarines were all recalled to have a watertight hatch fitted between the control room and the conning tower.
* * *
The year 1904 was when Fort Blockhouse was taken over from the army on a fifty-year lease and the submariners moved to Gosport. It was also the year when Courtney Boyle joined the submarine service, known by then as ‘The Trade’ because of one insult thrown in their direction that they looked like ‘unwashed chauffeurs’. He was 21, tall and thin, and extremely reserved, unlike so many of the other submarine officers. Courtney Boyle had been born in Carlisle, and christened Edward after his father – he always used his second name – but he and his younger brother Gerald, and his three sisters Kathleen, Gladys and Dulcie, were brought up in Hove (15 Norton Road).
There was heroism in the family: Courtney’s father was Colonel Edward Boyle, who had taken part in the 1868 Abyssinian Campaign. His uncle Richard, also his godfather, was the engineer who led the desperate and successful defence of Arrah House during the Indian Mutiny. But Courtney himself was not obviously in the hero mould, shy and perhaps not quite as confident as his fellows. He was at Cheltenham College and had been known as a successful wing playing rugby at HMS Britannia, the naval training establishment on the River Dart. He joined the battleship HMS Caesar as a midshipman in 1899 on China Station.
‘The Trade’, when he joined it, was a close-knit community of pioneers, united by the disdain heaped upon them by the rest of the navy and by the sheer peril of the early submarines, before any means of underwater escape had been devised. By the end of the year spent training, Boyle was appointed to his first command, taking over as the second or third commander of the tiny and awkward Holland No. 1, only three years old but already out of date.
This was an experimental period for everyone. Not only was it uncertain how submarines would manoeuvre underwater – the Hollands all did so by sloping forwards alarmingly – but the fixed periscope turned the image upside down and was anyway almost impossible to make out anything through. In 1905, Feilmann demonstrated this in A4, practicing an attack on a submarine tender in the Solent. He mistook a ladies’ red parasol on the beach at Alverstoke for the red flag of the target. His torpedo shot up the beach right next to the lady, who was the wife of a retired colonel, and legal action was narrowly averted.
Despite all the problems, the great success of the fleet manoeuvres of 1910 convinced the most senior doubter, and Admiral Wilson was then First Sea Lord. He ordered the first ocean-going submarines, the D class. He also appointed
a man he believed had the drive and enthusiasm to turn them into an elite force, one of the heroes of the Boxer Rebellion a decade before, Roger Keyes.
Keyes was a phenomenon. Youthful, enthusiastic to the point of boyishness, he had a slight figure and large ears but extraordinary charisma and a love of adventure, always slipping away from the strategists to be at the point of crisis. Like Churchill, he believed in his own lucky star, his own destiny, and was constantly seeking out courageous and determined individuals who enjoyed adventure as much as he did. He kept a copy of Kipling’s poem ‘If’ above his washbasin, and read it through every morning. “To me he was like Nelson in his simplicity, love of danger and greed for glory,” wrote Brodie about him. “He worshipped valour for its own sake…. The most loveable leader I have ever served.”
From his office at Fort Blockhouse, in an old Napoleonic era hulk called HMS Dolphin moored next door, where the Submarine Museum is now, Keyes took the submarine service by the scruff of its neck and fought for the resources and inspirational leaders he wanted, right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Then he flung his submarines into enemy waters, aware that the old doctrine stating submarines were defensive weapons was quite mistaken. They were offensive weapons or they were nothing.
Keyes was in the habit of sitting behind his commanders as they carried out a practice attack, and said he could feel the confidence of the crew in the man at the periscope. If he felt something different, then the captain would be out. His main struggle in the four years before the war was to launch the new class of E submarines, using the lessons from the D class, and to break the monopoly that the Vickers yard at Barrow-in-Furness had built up in their manufacture. This was difficult and the number of submarines in the navy at the outbreak of war was lower than they had been when he took over, but they were good ones. The first of the new E class were already at sea.
The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Page 45