The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (107 page)

Emphatically more lethal was the war against Allied shipping by German submarines and
surface raiders. Five German navy cruisers and a handful of armed merchant cruisers—passenger liners and freighters fitted with guns and carrying false papers—collectively captured or sank 620,000 tons of Allied shipping while diverting Allied naval assets from other assignments. Seventy-five ships were involved in the hunt for the German cruiser
Emden
before she was sunk in November 1914, and in the spring of 1917, fifty-four vessels were assigned to search for the freighter
Wolf,
which nonetheless managed to reach Germany after a fifteen-month cruise. Yet even in Allied countries commanders of the German surface raiders were often regarded as gallant. After the war,
Felix Graf von Luckner became an international celebrity for his exploits as commander of the three-masted ship
Seeadler
—the only sailing ship so employed—in which he captured sixteen ships without loss of life on either side.

The gravest threat to Great Britain was unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping bound for England. The idea for an underwater vessel had been around for hundreds of years—
Leonardo da Vinci drew a rough sketch of one in 1500. A primitive submarine called the
Turtle
had been deployed in New York Harbor during the American Revolution, though to little effect; in 1801
Robert Fulton built one that he tried to sell to the French and British governments; and during the American Civil War, the
H. L. Hunley
sank the screw sloop
USS
Housatonic
in
Charleston Harbor. Driven by a hand-cranked screw propeller, the
Hunley
’s weapon was a
spar torpedo, an explosive charge carried on the end of a long spar and detonated when placed against a ship’s hull. That the
Hunley
and other submersibles had to make physical contact with their target in order to place their
torpedoes (what are now called mines) limited their utility. The success of submersible boats had to await the invention of both a more practical and reliable submarine and a self-propelled torpedo.

The latter was achieved first, by
Robert Whitehead, a British engineer living in Trieste whose “
locomotive torpedo” of 1866 had a range of 185 meters at a speed of seven knots. The potential of torpedoes as an inexpensive means of sinking even ironclad
battleships was obvious, and most of the world’s navies purchased the right to manufacture them from Whitehead. The torpedo quickly gave rise to the torpedo boat and the torpedo boat destroyer. The former were smaller and faster than the battleships and cruisers that were their preferred prey, and difficult to hit with guns designed for use against big surface ships. Torpedo boat destroyers were designed to protect the larger ships against the new threat. In time,
ships of all sizes would be armed with torpedoes, and in the twentieth century destroyers would be the primary defense against the ultimate torpedo boat, the submarine.

In the nineteenth century, most work on practical
submarines was carried out by a handful of private inventors, notably the Irish-American schoolteacher
John P. Holland, and in England the Reverend
George Garrett, who later collaborated with Swedish weapons maker
Thorsten Nordenfelt. The French navy demonstrated official if limited interest in submarines and ordered the experimental
Plongeur
in 1863. Two decades later, Dupuy de Lôme noted that “
we are going to recommence the study of the submarine and we will end the conflict of the torpedo boats and the battleships by suppressing both of them.” The French launched several more submarines before 1900, the most promising of which used batteries for underwater propulsion and a steam engine
when surfaced, the same configuration hit on by Holland for his eponymous sixth and last creation.

“
The forerunner of all modern submarines,” in the opinion of British submariner and historian
Richard Compton-Hall, the
Holland
was designed “entirely along the lines of submarines today [the 1980s] with frames, plating and general arrangements which … would not be out of place in any submarine drawing-office today.” Her primary armament consisted of three 18-inch (45.7 cm) torpedoes fired from a single torpedo tube in the bow. As assistant secretary of the navy,
Theodore Roosevelt urged that the navy purchase the vessel, and in 1900 she was commissioned as
USS
Holland
. The navy ordered six more submarines on the same model and in 1905 President Roosevelt joined the crew of the
USS
Plunger
for a dive in
Long Island Sound. “
I went down in it,” he wrote, “chiefly because I did not like to have the officers and enlisted men think I wanted them to try things I was reluctant to try myself. I believe a good deal can be done with these submarines, although there is always the danger of people getting carried away with the idea and thinking that they can be of more use than they possibly could be.” Dupuy de Lôme’s view proved more prescient, but Roosevelt’s was more influential.

During
World War I, torpedoes, submarines, and mines made the close blockade of the German coast envisioned by prewar British planners untenable, so the
Admiralty opted for a distant blockade. The Grand Fleet kept watch on the northern approaches to the North Sea between the Orkneys and Norway while other units patrolled the English Channel. In November 1914, Britain declared the North Sea a war area. Three months later Germany adopted a strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Great Britain, where all French and British vessels were deemed fair game and neutral ships might also be attacked. Among the converts to this strategy was the apostle of the decisive fleet action himself, Tirpitz, who the month before wrote “
In view of the extraordinary importance of trade disruption, namely in supplying the west of England with food, I can promise an unqualified success from a cruiser war.” The irony was twofold. The naval arms race that had poisoned relations among the great powers was an expensive and ineffective means of actually prosecuting a naval war, the burden for which fell increasingly on smaller, less glamorous vessels including converted merchantmen, trawlers (used as minelayers and minesweepers), and submarines. But in September 1914, Germany had only thirty-seven submarines, less than half as many as the Royal Navy.

With the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Allied
merchant ship losses doubled from a monthly average of sixty-one thousand tons between the first six months of the war and the middle of 1915. Neither Britain’s “war area”
nor Germany’s “military area” was legal in terms of international law regarding blockade. The first two articles of the
Declaration of London (1909) specified that “
A blockade must not extend beyond the ports and coasts belonging to or occupied by the enemy”; and “In accordance with the
Declaration of Paris of 1856, a blockade, in order to be binding, must be … maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy coastline.” Yet the German strategy met with vigorous opposition because it depended on the use of submarines, which lacked the manpower to send prize crews aboard enemy ships; which stood little chance of surviving an engagement with an armed merchantman while surfaced; and whose commanders therefore had little recourse but to sink their prey and, increasingly, to do so without warning. The May 1915 sinking of the passenger liner
Lusitania
with the loss of 128 American citizens threatened to drag the United States into the war, and after considerable debate Germany suspended the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare in September.

The end of the submarine campaign around the British Isles freed
U-boats for service in the Mediterranean, where British, Australian, and
New Zealand troops were
pinned down at
Gallipoli. While Turkey would likely have allied with Germany anyway, it became a certainty when the Royal Navy requisitioned two Ottoman battleships under construction in British yards; Turkey concluded a secret treaty with Germany the same day. Promoted by
Winston Churchill, the Gallipoli campaign was intended to divert Turkish forces away from the oil fields of
Mesopotamia and the
Suez Canal, open a second front to alleviate pressure on Russia in the Caucasus, signal Allied support for Serbia, and prepare for an attack on
Istanbul. Churchill initially believed the Dardanelles could be forced by the navy alone, but when three battleships were sunk and three heavily damaged in March 1915, it was decided to land troops on the west side of the Gallipoli Peninsula. This was accomplished with heavy losses, and after almost nine months more or less pinned down on the beaches, the troops were withdrawn. In the meantime, the expedition’s utter failure had forced Jackie Fisher’s resignation as first sea lord and Churchill’s ouster as first lord of the admiralty.

By the end of 1916, many Germans believed that a resumption of unrestricted commerce warfare could force a British surrender by the fall of 1917. Included in this calculus was the likelihood that the United States would join the Allies, but that its contribution would come too late to make a difference. Unrestricted warfare resumed February 1, when there were 120 U-boats operational between the Mediterranean and Baltic. In the first three months, German submarines sank more than two million tons of shipping, nearly two-thirds of it British, for the loss of only nine U-boats. Part of the problem was
the Royal Navy’s preference for hunting submarines over protecting merchantmen by implementing a convoy system. Although the British had more than three hundred destroyers, this was inadequate for an effective convoy system, and the only source of support was the United States. Assigned as liaison to London immediately after the United States declared war in April 1917, Rear Admiral
William S. Sims was a forceful advocate for convoys. When a mere six destroyers arrived at Queenstown (Cobh, Ireland), he urged Washington “
we can not send too soon or too many.” A week after the Americans reached Queenstown, the first British convoy sailed from
Gibraltar and, according to a Royal Navy study after the war, was “
an entire success, and from that moment it may be said that the submarine menace was conquered.” With a naval staff still rooted in Mahanian concepts of sea power, the U.S. Navy was initially as resistant to convoys as the British, but new capital ship construction was dropped in favor of antisubmarine vessels, and more than
four hundred submarine chasers of all kinds were commissioned by war’s end. Together these provided adequate coverage for the transatlantic supply convoys vital to the British war effort.

Under the terms of the armistice signed November 11, 1918, a majority of the German fleet was interned pending a permanent disposition to be worked out at Versailles. Ten days later, seventy ships, including nine dreadnoughts and five
battlecruisers, sailed into the Grand Fleet’s
Orkney Islands anchorage at Scapa Flow. Weighed down by the humiliation of this surrender, and loath to see the fleet dispersed to Germany’s erstwhile enemies, Admiral
Ludwig von Reuter ordered his men to scuttle their ships on June 21, 1919. Fifty-two ships sank, including ten
battleships and ten battlecruisers. But embarrassing to the Allies though the scuttling of the German fleet was, many greeted the action with relief, for at a stroke it removed the issue of whether and how the ships should be apportioned among the victors. The United States viewed any distribution of the
Central Powers’ ships as inherently destabilizing, particularly because the Royal Navy already possessed forty-three capital ships, one more than the United States, Japan, France, and Italy combined. Moreover, President
Woodrow Wilson’s call for a reduction in national armaments “
to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety” became the basis for Article 8 of the Covenant of the
League of Nations.

The United States failed to ratify the
Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations, but it did convene the first of three naval arms limitation
conferences intended to rein in the world’s leading naval powers. Many in the U.S. Navy still viewed Britain as a potential threat to American interests and world stability and the Americans sought to at least equal the British as the world’s premier navy, while the British remained suspicious of French determination to maintain its submarine and cruiser forces. The Americans and Japanese were
mutually suspicious, as they had been since the end of the
Russo-Japanese War. Even before
World War I the Japanese had begun considering how to take on the American fleet, while the Americans developed
War Plan Orange as a response to a hypothetical takeover of the Philippines, the route to which ran through the Marshalls,
Micronesia, and the Carolines, where Japan now held formerly German islands as mandated territories. In a 1919 memorandum to President Wilson, Rear Admiral
William S. Benson
stated flatly “
Japan has no rival in the Pacific except America. Every ship built or acquired by Japan can have in mind only opposition to American naval strength in the Pacific.”

The battleship USS
Arizona
passing through the Panama Canal in the 1930s. Launched in 1918, four years after the opening of the canal, the
Arizona
was one of the “all-big-gun” battleships pioneered in 1905 by the Royal Navy’s HMS
Dreadnought
. Impressive though these powerful battlewagons were, their heyday was short, coinciding as it did with the rise of the submarine and the aircraft carrier. Dispatched to the Pacific in 1939 as tensions with Japan were rising, in December 1941 the
Arizona
was sunk at its berth in the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor, where it remains as a war memorial. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.