The story of the contest between our war-ships and their new enemy, the submarine, is the story of a most remarkable and successful adaptation. Of the six principal methods of defence used by our Navy at the end of the fourth year of war, three are old and three new; and it is a striking proof of the scientific ability of the Service, that the three old methods have been carefully reconsidered, and that, instead of abandoning them because, in their original use, they were apparently obsolete, our officers have turned them to even better account than the new inventions.
The oldest device for the protection of war-ships against torpedoes—whether fired by torpedo-boats or submarines—is the net. Our older battle-ships, as everyone will remember, were fitted with a complete set of steel nets on both sides, and with long booms for hanging them out. These booms, when not in use, were lashed diagonally along the ship’s sides, like great stitches, and gave the typical vessels of the British Fleet a peculiar and decidedly smart appearance. Very smart, too, was the quickness and precision with which the order ‘Out torpedo nets!’ was executed; but—long before 1914—everyone was perfectly aware that the nets were practically as much out of date as masts and sails.96 They were so heavy, and hung so low in the water, that no ship could man?uvre in them, and even for a fleet at anchor they had ceased to be a trustworthy defence; for the Whitehead torpedo was now fitted with cutters which could shear a way through the steel meshes.
Nets of the old type, therefore, have played no part in the present War—unless we are to believe the Turkish account of the sinking of the Ocean in the Dardanelles, according to which the nets were out, and were not only useless as a protection, but dragged down some of our men when they might otherwise have escaped by swimming. But, because one type of net is obsolete, the British Navy has seen no reason to reject all nets as impracticable. It is not beyond imagination to conceive a net so light and large of mesh, that it will diminish by no more than one knot the speed of the ship which carries it, and will yet catch and deflect a torpedo in the act of passing through it. For it must be remembered that the real problem is not how to stop a torpedo in its full 30-knot career, but how to prevent it from striking the ship with its head at an angle not too fine for the detonator to be fired. A turn of the helm, or the mere wave from the cut-water of a fast ship, has often sent a torpedo running harmlessly away along the quarter. The net of the future may be found equally successful in catching the fish by its whiskers and turning it forward along the bow, where the same wave will drive it outwards from the ship’s course.
The second familiar means of defence was the gun. Here again there was a temptation to despair. The secondary armament of any battle-ship or cruiser was fairly certain to make short work of a torpedo-boat, or of a submarine visible upon the surface. But no living97 gunner had ever fired at the periscope of a submarine—a mark only two feet, at most, out of the water, and only four inches in diameter. To see such an object at, say, 1,000 yards, was difficult; to hit it might well seem impossible. Yet 1,000 yards was but one-tenth of the possible range at which a modern submarine might fire its torpedo.
Nevertheless the use of the gun was not discarded; and two important discoveries were made in consequence. The first of these was that gunfire may be distant, wild, or even unaimed, and yet have an excellent effect. The existence of a submarine is so precarious—its chance of surviving a single direct hit is so slight—that the mere sound of a gun will almost always be enough to make it submerge completely—unless it can engage the enemy, with superior gun-power, at a range of its own choosing. When Captain Weddigen had already hit the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, and all three were sinking, the sound of the Cressy’s guns was enough to cause his disappearance, though it is very improbable that the shooting was really dangerous; for the listing of the ship was rapid, and according to eye-witnesses, the gallant gunners were soon firing in the air. Since then, the same thing has been repeatedly observed; and some brilliant successes by our patrol-boats and trawlers have shown that the U-boat has every right to be nervous when it hears even a 6-pounder talking English.
The other discovery is a much more recent one. As soon as it was once recognised that a torpedo is just as innocuous when deflected, as when stopped or evaded, the idea was sure to strike the handiest gunners in the world that they might use their weapons to disturb the98 straightforwardness of the fish’s onset. Even thirty knots is nothing to the velocity of a modern shell, and without hoping for a direct hit on an object from six to twenty-two feet under water, it was thought possible to give a twist to the torpedo’s nose sufficient to make a potential hit into a miss or a glancing shot. This feat was actually performed by the gunners of the Justitia, who, with splendid coolness, shot at torpedoes as sportsmen used to shoot at oncoming tigers, and succeeded in killing or diverting several, only to fall at last before the rush of numbers.
‘She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him.’
A third weapon of the war-ship was the ram; and the use of this, being an offensive-defensive method, was the best of all, as we shall see presently. It was, from the beginning, present to the mind of every naval man, for A. 1 (our very first submarine) was lost, with all hands, in May, 1904, by being accidentally rammed in the act of submerging. It happened, too, that the first attack made by a submarine against British war-ships in the present War was beaten by this method. On August 9, 1914, a squadron of our light cruisers sighted the periscope of a German U-boat, which had succeeded in approaching to within short range of them. In the account of the affair published at the time, we were informed that H.M.S. Birmingham had sunk the submarine by a direct hit on the periscope, and that this was the only shot fired. Some time afterwards, the truth became known—the Birmingham had to her credit, not an impossible feat of gunnery, but a brilliant piece of seamanship. She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him. Her captain was not led to do this by inspiration or desperation, but by a scientific knowledge of the elements in the problem. Without99
stopping to think afresh, he knew that a submarine takes a certain time to dive to a safe depth, and that his own ship, at 27 knots, would cover a good 900 yards of sea in one minute. When his eye measured the distance of that periscope, he saw that—given straight steering—the result was a mathematical certainty.
The new methods introduced during the War are also three in number. Of one—the use of dazzle-painting—we have already heard. It is, of course, a purely defensive measure, intended to deceive the eye at the periscope by misrepresenting the ship’s size, distance, and course. Another deceptive device is the phantom ship or dummy. A vessel of comparatively small size and value is covered more or less completely with a superstructure of light wood-work, with sham funnels, turrets and big guns, so that she has all the appearance of a battle-cruiser or Dreadnought. The U-boat may run after her, or run from her, according to his feeling at the moment; but, in either case, he will be wasting his time and laying up disappointment for himself. In May, 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, the Germans spent a certain amount of time and trouble in torpedoing a ship which they supposed to be H.M.S. Agamemnon, and in their illustrated propaganda sheets they give a picture of that ship as one of the victims of the irresistible U-boats. For a short time the story was believed inside Constantinople, and Mr. Lewis Einstein, of the American Embassy there, relates in his diary that this success, coming (as it appeared to do) immediately after the sinking of the Triumph and Majestic, was almost more than he could bear. Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon discovered the truth. The supposed Agamemnon was a dummy, and lay for some time near the entrance of102 the Dardanelles, with her false turrets and sham guns, exposed to the view of friends and foes on the two shores. Very possibly this dummy received a shot which might otherwise have been successfully directed against a genuine battle-ship, and the deception was thus really useful. The German cunning is expended in a very different direction. Its object is often to deceive their own people as to what has actually been lost, not to avert a possible loss at our hands. Thus when the super-submarine Bremen was sunk on her outward voyage for America, one dummy Bremen after another was ostentatiously brought home to a German port, as if returning from a successful Atlantic passage. A more flagrant instance still was the statement that, among the German losses in the Battle of Jutland, was the sinking of the Pommern, a small and obsolete battle-ship of 13,000 tons, built in 1905. The British Admiralty, who knew that that older Pommern had been sunk in the Baltic by Commander Max Horton, nearly a year before, had no difficulty in identifying the Pommern lost at Jutland with a new Dreadnought of the largest type, commissioned since her predecessor’s destruction and christened by her name—either then or at the moment when it became necessary to put a good face on their disasters in the battle. It is to be hoped that this state of things may continue on both sides. The Germans are welcome to our phantom ships, if we thereby save our real ones; while, if we can sink their real ones, we may well be content to hear them given imaginary names. The two Services have different ideas of what is a useful dummy.
The newest method of preserving ships from the torpedo is a purely constructional device, and very little103 can be said of it here. But we have been allowed to know this much—the Marlborough was torpedoed at Jutland, but returned to the line of battle within nine minutes, fought for three hours, and eventually came home under her own steam, defeating a submarine attack on the way. We are not told how this very satisfactory result is attained in the construction of a Dreadnought of 25,000 tons, capable of full battle-ship speed. It cannot be by the mere addition of the bulging compartments known as ‘blisters,’ for in the older cruisers in which these were tried they were found to cause too great a sacrifice of speed. The result, however, is there; and there can be no doubt that as the number of unsinkable ships increases, the activity of the U-boat will be very greatly discouraged.
But it would be contrary to the principles of war and the genius of our Navy, to rely upon purely defensive measures to defeat the submarine enemy. It is sometimes said that the U-boat campaign took us by surprise. So far as this applies to the legitimate use of the submarine against war-ships, the statement is quite untrue. The campaign against merchant shipping and non-combatant passengers, waged in defiance of all international law and common humanity, did certainly take us by surprise; and it is only to our credit, and the discredit of our enemies, that their barbarity was beyond our imagination. But the efforts of the U-boats against our fleet were, as we have shown in a previous chapter, actually less successful than our own attacks upon theirs, and our tacticians were never for a moment at a loss to deal with them. The principles had been thought out long ago. As early as 1907, the distinguished admiral who writes over the name ‘Barfleur’104 clearly stated his belief that ‘the untried submarine’ was not likely to prove more effective than the torpedo-boat and destroyer in depriving our Battle Fleet of the control of the sea. ‘Nothing is more to be deprecated,’ he added, ‘than the attempt which has been made to enhance unduly its importance, by playing on the credulity of the public. The new instrument of war has no doubt a value, but that it is anything more than an auxiliary, with limited and special uses, is difficult to believe.’ And he turned back to old and tried principles: ‘The traditional role of the British Navy is not to act on the defensive, but to prepare to attack the force which threatens.’ In September, 1914, when Weddigen’s coup showed that the moment had come, ‘Barfleur’ was among the first to attack the new problem tactically—he saw at once that the war-ship’s best defence lies in the offensive power given by her immense superiority in speed and weight. And if the single ship is formidable to the submarine, a squadron is still more so. By its formation, its man?uvres, its pace and its ramming power, it reverses the whole situation—the hunter becomes the hunted, and must fly like a wolf from a pack of wolf-hounds, every one more powerful than itself.
There remains, of course, the question of the best formation for the squadron to adopt. Upon this point there are more opinions than one, and a conversation may be reported in which the merits of line abreast and line ahead were set against one another by two naval officers, and both put out of court by a third. The first two were captains commanding ships in two different squadrons. They argued the question between them with great seriousness; but in so cool and abstract a105 manner, that the spectator might be pardoned for suspecting—rightly or wrongly—that they were supporting doctrines which were not personal to themselves but derived from higher authority—perhaps from their respective admirals, both men of great ability and experience. It was noticeable, too, that the admiral at whose table the disputants were sitting, and who himself commanded yet another squadron, maintained an attitude of neutrality; though it is certain that he and his own officers, several of whom were present, had often discussed the problem, and were probably agreed upon the answer to it.
‘Speed,’ said Captain A, ‘seems to be the key to the solution. It is only in line ahead that speed helps you—in fact gives you something like practical safety. If a torpedo, fired at a column in line ahead, misses the ship it is aimed at, it is very unlikely to be so wide a shot as to hit either the next ahead or next astern—it is a miss directly it crosses the line.’
Captain B remained perfectly grave, but he looked very well content with this argument. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘theoretically; but, in fact, the contrary has happened. In a column of eight ships, in line ahead, the London and the Formidable were the last two. You remember that the torpedo which sank the Formidable was believed to have been meant for the London. And anyhow, speed and stormy weather failed to save the rear ship.’
‘The speed was insufficient,’ replied Captain A, ‘not worth calling speed. When your fleet is in line abreast, columns disposed astern, the theoretical chances of hitting are much greater. Speed is no advantage in such a formation—in fact it may be a positive disadvantage.106 It may actually increase the virtual target. A shot which misses the near ship of a line abreast may still hit one of the others.’
‘Laurence,’ said Captain B, ‘when he fired at the Moltke, considered her, as wing ship of the squadron, to be his only chance.’
‘There was no second line disposed astern,’ replied Captain A; ‘but even so, if his torpedo had just missed, ahead of the Moltke, the next or next but one in the line might have come forward just in time to receive the shot.’
‘That,’ said Captain B, ‘is a mere question of time and distance; and, in anything like ordinary circumstances, you would not get your result. Say the ships are three cables apart, and doing only fifteen knots. The torpedo is going double the speed; but by the time it has run the three cables along the line, the next ship will have gone one and a half cables ahead and be past the danger point.’
‘Your ship may be zigzagging,’ replied Captain A, ‘and run right into it. Line ahead has the advantage there—in fact, speaking generally, I have the power, which you have not, of immediate deployment in any direction. I can avoid mines, or turn away from the submarine altogether.’
‘Certainly,’ said Captain B, looking again quite well content, ‘but you would not turn away in any case—you would best defend yourself by attacking the submarine.’
Captain A hesitated a moment. ‘Yes,’ he replied at last, ‘but in line abreast your attack might be positively dangerous to yourself. Suppose your columns in line abreast to be zigzagging, as they probably would107 be, and imagine one of your ships to put her helm the wrong way—there would inevitably be a collision.’
‘I cannot imagine such a thing,’ said Captain B.
‘I appeal to the Admiral,’ said Captain A.
It seemed an embarrassing thing, for a host and superior officer, to be called upon to give judgment between his guests on so serious an argument. But the Admiral was not in the least embarrassed. He did not even express his own opinion, which was thought to favour Captain B. ‘Let me remind you,’ he said, ‘that you have not examined the most important witness in the case—the commander of the submarine. What order is the most dangerous for the submarine to meet? I asked Commander C, one of our best E-boat officers, this question lately, and he replied “Quarter-line, undoubtedly.”’
He turned to the only landsman present, and reminded him that in a quarter-line, or bow-and-quarter line, the ships are echeloned each upon the quarter of the next ahead instead of directly astern. He added, ‘A will say that this is in his favour, because ships in a quarter-line are really in line ahead, only that each one in turn is a little out of the straight. And B will claim that he wins, because a quarter-line is merely a line abreast in which each ship lags a little more behind the true front. And C will tell us that the only thing which matters is that the quarter-line gives the unhappy submarine less chance of hitting, and more chance of being sunk than either of the other two formations. And thereupon the Court is adjourned.’