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Defeating the U-boat

Inventing Antisubmarine Warfare

Jan S. Breemer

© 2010 by Jan S. Breemer

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE PRESS

Newport, Rhode Island THE UNITED STATES

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Naval War College

Newport, Rhode Island

Center for Naval Warfare Studies

Newport Paper Thirty-six

August 2010

President, Naval War College

Rear Adm. James P. Wisecup, USN

Provost

Amb. Mary Ann Peters

Dean of Naval Warfare Studies

Robert C. Rubel

Naval War College Press

Director: Dr. Carnes Lord

Managing Editor: Pelham G. Boyer

Telephone: 401.841.2236

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E-mail: press@usnwc.edu

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Printed in the United States of America

The Newport Papers are extended research projects that the

Director, the Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, and the

President of the Naval War College consider of particular

interest to policy makers, scholars, and analysts.

The views expressed in the Newport Papers are those of the

authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the

Naval War College or the Department of the Navy.

Correspondence concerning the Newport Papers may be

addressed to the Director of the Naval War College Press.

To request additional copies, back copies, or subscriptions

to the series, please either write the President (Code 32S),

Naval War College, 686 Cushing Road, Newport, RI

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Reproduction and printing are subject to the Copyright Act

of 1976 and applicable treaties of the United States. This

document may be freely reproduced for academic or other

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reproductions credit the author and Newport Papers series

and that the Press editorial office be informed. To obtain

permission to reproduce this publication for commercial

purposes, contact the Press editorial office.

ISSN 1544-6824

ISBN 978-1-884733-77-2

The author thanks the Smith Richardson Foundation for its support,

which helped make writing this story possible.

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Contents

Foreword, by Carnes Lord 

Introduction: “We Are Losing the War” 

CHAPTER ONE “The Submarine Boat Does Not and

Cannot Revolutionize

Naval Warfare” 

CHAPTER TWO Cutting the Thin Thread 

CHAPTER THREE “The Old Theories Have Been Tried an

Found Wanting” 

CHAPTER FOUR “We Run a Great Risk of Losing

the War” 

Conclusion 

Abbreviations 

About the Author 

The Newport Papers 

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Foreword

The emergence of operationally effective submarines in the decade or so precedi

outbreak of World War I revolutionized naval warfare. The pace of change in nav

technologies generally in the late nineteenth century was unprecedented, but the 

marine represented a true revolution in the nature of war at sea, comparable onl

the emergence of naval aviation in the period following the First World War or 

ballistic missiles and the atomic bomb following the Second. It is therefore not a

gether surprising that the full promise and threat of this novel weapon were not 

diately apparent to observers at the time. Even after submarines had proved their

effectiveness in the early months of the war, navies were slow to react to the new 

gic and operational environment created by them. The Royal Navy in particular f

to foresee the vulnerability of British maritime commerce to the German U-bo

especially after the Germans determined on a campaign of unrestricted submarin

warfare—attack without warning on neutral as well as enemy merchant shipping

in 1917.

In Defeating the U-boat: Inventing Antisubmarine Warfare, Newport Paper 36, Jan 

Breemer tells the story of the British response to the German submarine threat. H

account of Germany’s “asymmetric” challenge (to use the contemporary term) to 

ain’s naval mastery holds important lessons for the United States today, the U.S. N

in particular. The Royal Navy’s obstinate refusal to consider seriously the option 

convoying merchant vessels, which turned out to be the key to the solution of the 

boat problem, demonstrates the extent to which professional military cultures ca

thwart technical and operational innovation even in circumstances of existential 

Although historical controversy continues to cloud this issue, Breemer concludes 

the convoying option was embraced by the Royal Navy only under the pressure o

ian authority. Breemer ends his lively and informative study with some general re

tions on military innovation and the requirements for fostering it.

CARNES LORD

Director, Naval War College Press

Newport, Rhode Island

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“We Are Losing the War”

On 10 April 1917, Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims, U.S. Navy, sat across from 

Royal Navy’s Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe. Sims and his aide 

arrived in London on that same day, less than twenty-four hours after their passe

steamer had docked in Liverpool. While they were at sea, on 6 April, the America

Congress had declared war on Germany and its allies. Anticipating hostilities, the 

Navy Secretary, Josephus Daniels, had ordered Sims to London to, in Sims’s word

in touch with the British Admiralty, to study the naval situation and learn how w

could best and most quickly cooperate in the naval war.”1

Now, sitting across from

him—“calm, smiling and imperturbable”—was the First Sea Lord. With operatio

responsibility for the entire British navy, Jellicoe was well placed to confirm the b

of Sims and most Americans that the British fleet “had the situation well in hand

It did not. Sims was shocked to learn that the struggle against the U-boats had be

less successful than was being portrayed in the American and British newspapers

When he realized that the numbers of sinkings of British and neutral merchantm

were three and four times larger than reported, Sims observed, “It looks as thou

the Germans were winning the war.”3

Jellicoe agreed. New, promising weapons, n

the depth charge, were being developed, but if the U-boats kept up their current 

of sinkings, they would not be ready in time. That was why it was critical that the 

Navy immediately send help in the way of destroyers and other small vessels. Aft

meeting, Sims cabled Washington that, “briefly stated, I consider that at the prese

moment we are losing the war.”4

He also warned Secretary Daniels that reports o

ish tactical successes against the U-boats should be treated with a great deal of sk

cism. He wrote: “Accept no reports of submarine losses as authentic and certain u

survivors are captured or the submarine itself definitely located by dragging.”5

Th

April report on monthly ship losses seemed to bear out Sims’s fear. In what woul

out to be the peak month of the U-boats’ productivity, 860,334 tons of shipping 

sunk. Also, the exchange rate between the numbers of allied ships lost and U-boa

sunk was, from the defender’s perspective, the worst ever—167 : 1.6

INTRODUCTION

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mactic” occasion, the German submarine fleet surrendered. Between 20 November and

1 December 1918, 114 U-boats gave themselves up in British ports; more were seized in

German harbors.7

In October, the last full month of the war, shipping losses had

declined to 116,237 tons.8

As a result of this happy turn of events, wrote one British

army officer, he and his fellow officers at the allied headquarters in France lacked

only “certain material—particularly . . . chocolate, biscuits, and tinned fruits in the

canteens.”9

How had the desperate situation Sims was told about in the spring of 1917 come to

pass? How was it possible that a craft that had shown its seaworthiness only two

decades before and that, right up to the war, was still being dismissed by many naval

officers as more dangerous to its own crew than its intended victim had managed effec

tively to neutralize the most powerful fleet in the world? When it did, the submarine

overturned one of the most sacred tenets of the prevailing conception of sea power—

the notion, expressed most cogently only a few years before by Alfred Thayer Mahan,

that sea power was about command of the sea, that its possession turned on victory in

decisive battles between fleets of dreadnoughts. According to this dogma, the side that

won command accomplished two things simultaneously thereby. First, “owning” command meant that the opponent could no longer use the sea for its purposes—for

instance, to ship goods and raw materials or threaten seaborne landings. Next, the side

in command had the unfettered use of the sea for its own purposes—moving supplies

and troops, launching attacks against the enemy shore, and so forth. The tonnage war

waged by the U-boats revolutionized naval warfare by rendering obsolete this basic

principle of pre–World War I naval thinking. The transformation of naval warfare from

the surface of the seas to the water column below had served to bifurcate command of

the sea. Britain in 1917 still controlled the seas in, as Sims put it, the “old Nelsonian

sense”—its Grand Fleet of dreadnoughts kept its German counterpart, the High Sea

Fleet, in port, and the German merchant fleet had effectively disappeared from the

oceans.10 But that same Grand Fleet could not guarantee the safety of Britain’s own

trade routes and ensure the arrival of enough foodstuffs, war supplies, and so on.

In the end, of course, the British and their allies did manage to defeat the U-boat’s stra

tegic goal of economic strangulation. The U-boats’ defeat at the strategic level of war

bears emphasizing, because it can be argued with considerable force that the allies

never quite managed to defeat the German submarine fleet tactically or technically.

True, U-boat losses in absolute terms went up very significantly in 1917 and 1918, from

twenty-two in 1916 to sixty-three and sixty-nine in 1917 and 1918, respectively. Much

of this was due to the introduction of the depth charge and better mines. But these

gains become less significant when it is realized that thanks to new construction, the

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son that the probability of a U-boat being detected and attacked successfully wen

as more and more U-boats went to sea.

Countering the submarine’s revolutionary impact on the old command-of-the-s

principle and restoring the ability to use the seas at acceptable cost called for equ

revolutionary countermeasures. Those countermeasures had little to do with new

weapons or technologies. Both did play a role, of course, notably the depth charg

hydro-acoustic devices. But these and other technological innovations made coll

tively a comparatively small contribution to the conceptual counterrevolution th

at the heart of the U-boat’s final defeat in World War I. That defeat was made po

first and foremost, by compromising what was arguably the very ethos of the nav

profession, namely the belief that wars at sea are fought and won by aggressively

seeking out and sinking the enemy.

Notes

1. Rear Adm. William Sowden Sims, The Victory at Sea (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,

Page, 1921), p. 3.

2. Ibid., p. 7.

3. Ibid., p. 9. Also, Admiral of the Fleet, the Rt.

Hon. Earl Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril: Admiralty Policy in 1917 (London: Cassell,

1934), pp. 70–71.

4. Sims, Victory at Sea, p. 43.

5. Sims to Daniels, 19 April 1917, in AngloAmerican Naval Relations 1917–1919, ed.

Michael Simpson (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower

for the Navy Records Society, 1991), p. 42

[emphasis in the original].

6. Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of W

War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institu

1994), p. 341.

7. Ibid., p. 448.

8. Ibid., p. 423.

9. “G.S.O.,” G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer

don: Philip Allan, 1920), pp. 130–31

10. Sims, Victory at Sea, p. 21.

11. The total number of U-boats on 1 Ja

1916 stood at 133; on 1 January 1917

and on 11 November 1918, 134. Two 

dred twenty-nine more boats were u

construction at the time of the armis

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“The Submarine Boat Does Not and Canno

Revolutionize Naval Warfare”

The submarine was history’s first “absolute weapon.”1It was so because never bef

had a weapon been created that so defied man’s scientific ability to produce quic

counterweapon. For one, the submarine was the first man-made weapon to go ab

war-making business in the third dimension. This produced an unprecedented ch

lenge for the development of countermeasures. Previously, striking a target with 

sort of projectile had required a fire-control solution in only one or two dimensi

One-dimensional targets—for example, land-based fortifications—are easiest to 

because they are fixed. Two-dimensional, or moving, targets present a much mor

cult gunnery problem. During the age of sail, the problem was “solved” by engag

point-blank ranges, making the target nearly immobile relative to the gun. The in

trial revolution at sea during the second half of the nineteenth century had made 

impossible, however. Fighting ranges had, by the time the submarine appeared on 

scene, expanded to thousands of yards, and the problem of hitting a moving ship 

a platform that itself is moving was barely beginning to be solved. The submarin

ability to navigate not only on a plane but also up and down presented an even m

complex fire-control problem—even for a visible target.

The submarine’s invisibility—at least some of the time—and its ability therefore 

move and attack unseen posed an unprecedented problem for the traditional too

naval power. In fact, there were two problems. First, how does a ship moving on t

surface of the oceans defend itself against attack “below the belt”? Second, if it su

how does it find and sink the unseen attacker? These were questions that particu

concerned the British naval leadership. For years, their lordships had been wont t

ignore or dismiss as wasteful tinkering the underwater designs of inventors all ov

world. Even as the early experimental craft slowly matured and demonstrated a r

ability to maneuver underwater, it did not make sense for the country that had b

the world’s largest investment in “legacy” seagoing forces to encourage a weapon 

might undermine that investment. Two developments forced the Royal Navy to r

CHAPTER ONE

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experimental stage and that, like it or not, the service would likely have to contend with

it in future wars.

The first development was the growing underwater fleet of Britain’s traditional enemy

at sea, the French navy. The French had been experimenting with sous-marins since the

1860s. They established the world’s first submarine branch in 1888, when the thirty-ton

Gymnote was commissioned. Five years later, the much larger (266 tons) Gustave Zédé

(named after Gymnote’s designer) was launched, and two others (Narval and Morse)

were completed before the turn of the century. In 1899 the French staged a series of

highly publicized exercises in which Zédé repeatedly and successfully “attacked” the

battleship Magenta. One observer’s account related how the submarine accomplished

the “extraordinary exploit of sending a torpedo in an absolutely straight line between

the funnels of the battle-ship.”2

Frenchmen and Britons alike had no doubt about the

event’s significance, coming as it did on the heels of the Anglo-French crisis at Fashoda

In France, a public subscription organized by the newspaper Le Matin collected more

than a million francs, enough to buy two more submarines.3

One rumor even had it

that France planned to build no fewer than a hundred of the underwater vessels.4

Britain as yet had none.

The other development occurred on the opposite side of the Atlantic. In 1899 the U.S.

Navy’s chief engineer, John Lowe, announced that he was entirely satisfied with the

recently completed trials of a seventy-five-ton submarine (Holland VI) built by John P.

Holland. The craft had proved, he said, that it was capable of making “a veritable attack

upon the enemy unseen and undetectable, and that therefore, she is an engine of warfare of terrible potency which the government must necessarily adopt into its service.”5

Although the American navy ordered only five more Holland types instead of the fifty

Lowe had urged, the message was loud and clear at Whitehall: the submarine could no

longer be dismissed as little more than France’s latest attempt to solve its navy’s hopeless inferiority by way of a theoretically brilliant but practically useless “quick fix.” The

American submarine buy had changed things altogether. In a note written to the Royal

Navy’s future First Sea Lord, Sir John “Jackie” Fisher, one rear admiral admitted that he

did not know whether submarines would or would not be useful in warfare. But, he

thought, considering the fact that a “common-sense level-headed nation like that of th

United States, has tried and adopted them, it would appear probable that such craft

must have some value in warlike operations.”6

The corollary was, of course, that if the submarine was going to be a practical engine o

war, the British fleet had better learn how to defend against it. The head of the service

had no difficulty identifying the crux of the defensive problem to come: first, “How to

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in Britain under license from the Electric Boat company, were ordered from the U

States to start the navy’s education in underwater warfare.

After having studiously ignored the submarine for years, Britain’s naval leadershi

could hardly admit that the French might have been on the right path all along, t

they were suddenly persuaded that the craft might usefully complement the “rea

The purchase of the Holland vessels was officially justified as having chiefly “exp

mental purposes.”8

It was patently obvious that the problem of finding and destr

an enemy submarine could not be solved by another submarine. Very limited res

toward solving the first half of the antisubmarine warfare (ASW) problem—dete

the submarine—had begun in the early 1890s and had focused on developing a p

cal hydrophone. However, little progress was made during the next couple of dec

when war broke out, only a handful of ships had been fitted with a mix of British

U.S.-made systems. Under favorable conditions—a calm sea with little wind, and 

engines stopped—it was sometimes possible actually to hear a noisy U-boat. But 

were rare occasions, and in any case, the early devices were omnidirectional syste

they could not tell from which direction the noise came.9

As far as destroying the submarine was concerned, efforts during the prewar year

concentrated, naturally enough, on developing some sort of underwater explosiv

Basically, two different types of ordnance were needed. The first was a mine to pr

ports and harbors against an enemy submarine blockade and, on the offensive si

barricade the enemy’s submarine bases. Next needed was some sort of ship-carri

explosive for use against submarines caught at sea. Sea mines were already famili

weapons of war; many countries, including Great Britain, relied on (shore contro

minefields to protect ports and harbors. In Britain, as in the United States, the “s

defense of the coast with guns and minefields was the army’s responsibility, the n

being left free to pursue would-be invaders on the high seas. This burden sharing 

reflected the Royal Navy’s self-image as a “blue water” force: it existed to seek out 

enemy wherever he might be, not to tie itself to coastal waters and wait for the en

to show up. This offensive ethos had difficulty accommodating mines. They were 

as defensive weapons, the “asymmetric”—and rather unsporting—resort of the w

power. It is no surprise then that the technical development of mines and mine

countermeasures did not figure prominently among the Royal Navy’s pre–Wor

War I priorities.10 In 1894, and again in 1903, the Admiralty canceled all developm

of independent mines for use other than harbor defense.11 Programs were resum

after the Russo-Japanese War, but years of official vacillation saddled Britain with 

stockpile of weapons that were notoriously unreliable and designed to sink surfa

ships, not submarines.

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submarines. Two weapons were in the inventory when the war began: explosive sweeps

and the so-called lance-bomb. The first, which came in several versions, basically

involved a ship-towed hydroplane carrying a guncotton charge. The idea was to cross a

suspected U-boat’s track, entangle it in some part of the cable, and then electrically

detonate the charge.12 Most naval officers on the eve of war expected little from the

device, but the alternative, the lance-bomb, was even less palatable. This was a handthrown weapon, consisting of a seven-pound charge attached to a wooden handle

between three and four and a half feet long. Supposedly, a strong man could throw the

weapon seventy-five yards.13 The fact that some twenty thousand of the devices were

produced during the war, even though any analysis could have easily foretold that they

almost certainly presented a greater danger to the “launch platforms” than intended

victims, is a clue to the desperate state of ASW at the time. Admiral Fisher told Prime

Minister Asquith as much in a memorandum less than four months before war broke

out: “No word of a submarine destroyer has ever been heard because it has been forced

upon us, by experience, that submarines cannot fight submarines, nor has any successful antidote been found even by the most bitter antisubmarine experts with unlimited

means for experiments.”14

“The Question of the Protection of British Maritime Commerce Is Not an

Important One”

In his autobiography, which appeared a year after World War I had ended, Admiral Sir

Percy Scott—the “father” of modern Royal Navy gunnery—reported that the depth

charge could have been developed and in use in 1914, two years before the first models

actually entered the fleet.15 He blamed the Admiralty’s lack of interest in the submarine

and, hence, submarine defenses.16 It is probably fairer to say that the problem had less

to do with a lack of interest per se than a failure to appreciate fully how much the submarine and its capabilities had changed since the first flotillas were formed ten or so

years earlier. Intimately related was the failure to reconsider seriously how the enemy

might use these much more advanced capabilities. Although it was well known on the

eve of World War I that the submarine of 1914 was capable of venturing much farther

out to sea than its first-generation predecessor, it was still expected to busy itself mainl

with defense against a would-be blockading fleet and in surreptitious, long-range

scouting. Radio had improved considerably, and it was thought that forward-deployed

submarines could give early warning of enemy fleet movements. Ironically, the submarine soon became the surveillance platform of choice, in part because by 1914, its at-se

endurance was better than that of most destroyers.

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thought to the possibility that the submarine might be used against other than “l

mate”—that is, naval—targets, that its victims might be civilian shipping instead

was not that the idea of attacking the opponent’s seaborne commerce itself was

unimaginable; commerce raiding had been practiced for centuries, and British n

planners fully anticipated having to deal with it again in the next war. It was the s

marine’s method that made its use as a commerce raider unthinkable for most na

officers. Namely, it was patently obvious that the craft’s diminutive size and smal

effectively prevented it from engaging in antitonnage warfare in conformance wi

internationally agreed Prize Regulations. Sinking merchantmen without warning 

without ensuring the safety of passengers and crew was simply “not done” by civ

nations.17 Winston Churchill, then the Admiralty’s First Lord (roughly the equiva

minister of the navy), fairly summed up this attitude in a memo to Admiral Fish

after the latter had written that Germany would likely use its submarines in exac

manner. Churchill thought his senior naval officer had written an “excellent” pap

that it was “to some extent, marred by the prominence” it gave to the idea of a U

commerce war. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “this would ever be done by a civilize

power.” To emphasize his abhorrence, he suggested that a German decision to go 

anyway would justify brutal retaliatory measures, such as spreading pestilence, po

ing the water of the perpetrator’s great cities, and assassinating its leaders.18 Inter

ingly, in what seems to be a case of wishful thinking, some naval officers thought 

the submarine’s very inability to abide by the Prize Regulations meant that it cou

and would not pose a threat to commerce.19

The rejection of the idea that a civilized power would destroy private property on 

high seas without warning was certainly understandable; the concept of “total wa

between nations, not just armies, had yet to be born. But this alone cannot explai

ain’s dismal lack of preparedness. The fact of the matter is that the Royal Navy sa

protection of commerce, be it against raiders on the surface of the sea or undern

as an unglamorous, secondary, and worst of all, defensive priority that could not 

allowed to interfere with what the service considered its primary responsibility: t

out and battle the enemy’s fleet. An Admiralty note in 1905 said it as follows: “Th

duty of British fleets and squadrons will be to seek out the corresponding fleets a

squadrons of the enemy with a view to bringing them to action and fighting for t

which is the only really decisive factor—the command of the sea.”20

The Admiralty reluctantly acknowledged its responsibility for the safe arrival of o

seas foodstuffs but made patently clear that it would brook no political interferen

its war preparations. A royal commission charged with looking into the wartime 

nerability of the country’s supply line was told that the navy would not sanction 

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tle. The pertinent paragraph in the commission’s final report is revealing:

In commenting upon the apprehension that the disposition of the British Fleet, squadrons, or ships

might be adversely affected and the free action of the Admiralty impaired by popular pressure, exercised through Parliament upon the Government, thus influencing the Admiralty instructions to the

admirals, it was remarked that the Admiralty could never allow their action to be influenced by any

pressure, and yet consent to remain responsible for the conduct of the war.21

The Royal Navy’s war plans of this period, as well as its estimate of Germany’s plans at

sea, faithfully reflected its preoccupation with the big-battle idea and the cavalier dismissal of the possible danger to trade. Its “War Plans and Distribution of the Fleet” of

1907–1908 estimated that attacks on British commerce had the lowest priority in the

German scheme for war at sea. The Germans were expected to aim, like the British

themselves, at a decisive clash between battle fleets.22 Consequently, enemy attacks

against trade would be, according to the plan’s authors, the “least serious of all the possible German operations of war.” Even if, contrary to expectations, the enemy

attempted a concerted raiding campaign, superior British naval power would “effectively prevent any organized attack on our trade” and reduce it to “simple pinpricks.”

The British navy, the plans continued, really had only two worries: first, to bring the

German fleet to decisive action; and second, to “resist the pressure of public opinion

and refuse to be coerced into departing from its carefully considered war plan” just

because a handful of merchantmen had been taken by enemy raiders.23

What makes this attitude particularly striking is that the few studies that had been don

on the subject had suggested that German raiders might have considerable success, at

least in the early part of a war. For example, in a memorandum less than three months

before the outbreak of war, the director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, Captain

Richard Webb, estimated that Britain’s “foreign-going” merchant fleet could lose as many

as seventy-seven ships per week. The memorandum did not explain how this number

had been arrived at but claimed it could be achieved by no more than four cruisers and

twelve armed liners in the Atlantic and a smattering of commerce raiders elsewhere.24

(In the event, the U-boats did not achieve such a high kill rate even at the height of the

unrestricted campaign.)

The Webb memorandum did not mention submarines; neither did the Admiralty’s war

plans of 1907–1908. This is perhaps understandable, since the first U-boat (U-1) was

not commissioned until late 1906—that is, about the time the plans were being completed. Could it therefore be said that the Navy’s seemingly casual attitude toward the

protection of commerce reflected, in fact, a balanced and realistic assessment of the

threat at the time? Or putting it in a different way, if the German navy of 1906 had

owned the two dozen or so submarines it possessed at the start of World War I, would

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pay more than passing attention to Germany’s nascent underwater fleet in 1909–

when about half a dozen boats had been commissioned. But the addition of this 

enemy capability seems to have had little impact on the plans of 1907–1908. True

had become broadly agreed that once Germany had acquired a sizable underwate

the Royal Navy might need some time to exercise its command of the “narrow se

(the Channel, its approaches, and the seas surrounding Great Britain) by the tim

honored means of battle-fleet “sweeps.” The First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, in pa

lar warned that swarms of U-boats might make the narrow seas quite untenable 

conventional warships. One of his publicists, retired army colonel Charles à Cou

Repington, “leaked” Fisher’s views in a series of journal articles in 1910 concludi

“there will be no place for any great ship in the North Sea.”25 With what turned o

be a surprising prescience, he painted a submarine antitonnage campaign that w

undermine the nation’s ability to feed “some tens of millions,” would cause a gre

in food and fuel prices, and very possibly provoke food riots. Since nothing had b

invented or built to defeat the U-boat, he wrote, “nothing we can effect with nav

means can, with any certainty, prevent German submarines from putting to sea w

they please, and from appearing off our coasts at their own sweet will.”26

Few among the British naval leadership, though, subscribed to Fisher and Reping

bleak prognosis. Most appear to have shared (then) Rear Admiral Jellicoe’s view

instead. It basically held that the U-boat would almost certainly make the planni

execution of a decisive fleet-against-fleet battle much more complicated but that 

enough energy and effort, the problem would be brought under control and the 

Sea made safe for a modern-day Trafalgar. In a note in 1909, Jellicoe wrote that e

with a maximum effort, it would be another eight years before Germany had eno

submarines truly to menace the North Sea. In the event, the fleet might at some p

have to be kept out of harm’s way but, over time, enough U-boats would be sunk 

allow the big ships to come out and fight a decisive action.27 Jellicoe did not make 

how his navy would go about eradicating the U-boats.

Ironically, the British estimate of the German naval threat was not much off the 

The German naval leadership, by and large, shared the “acknowledged axiom, pr

from war-history, that the struggle at sea must be directed to gaining the mastery 

sea, i.e., to removing all opposition which stands in the way of its free and unhin

use.”28 The alternative—guerilla warfare against the enemy’s commerce—was reg

by most German naval officers as a winless proposition. That said, the idea of usi

submarines to attack commerce was certainly known and discussed in profession

journals.29 According to Germany’s official account of the war at sea, the U-boat 

younger officers—who were more familiar than their battle-fleet colleagues with 

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evidence, however, that any formal planning on these lines took place before the war.31

Instead, prewar planning for the U-boat flotillas was focused mainly on how they could

best be used to create favorable conditions for a decisive fleet battle. In particular, the

U-boats were seen as the key to whittling down the numerically superior Grand Fleet

to approximate parity (Kräfteausgleich) with Germany’s High Sea Fleet. Then, and only

then, would the Kaiser’s dreadnoughts sally forth and engage their opposite numbers.

The only problem was that the British had come to the same conclusion: that the narrow seas would likely be a submarine and mine trap. The U-boats would soon take

their toll among patrolling cruisers and destroyers, but the prize targets, the Grand

Fleet’s battleships and battle cruisers, would keep their distance, in northernmost

Scotland.

If neither British nor German prewar planning anticipated a submarine tonnage war,

can it yet be argued that there were enough “indicators and warnings” to make this in

fact a plausible contingency against which Britain’s Admiralty planners should have

guarded? A reasonable case can be made that the basic conceptual and material “building blocks” for this kind of warfare were already there, that the unrestricted U-boat

campaign of 1917–18 was far more conceivable in 1914 than planners on either side of

the North Sea were willing to admit at the time. To begin with, the idea, so repulsive to

Churchill, that a “civilized” opponent would sink a nonmilitary vessel, including crew

and cargo, without giving proper warning and allowing the crew time to abandon ship

was hardly without precedent. Its progenitor can be found in the “Jeune École.” This

school of naval strategic thought, which, though centered in France, had adherents

among naval officers throughout the Continent, argued that “mosquito fleets” of torpedo boats and gunboats, not big-gun armorclads, were the weapons of future war at

sea; that rather than seeking battle à la Trafalgar, the aim should be to destroy the

enemy’s oceanic trade, attack his port cities at night, and thus trigger financial panic

and “bread riots” among the working class.32 Among the movement’s leading lights

were French admiral Hyacinthe-Laurent-Théophile Aube and his journalist protégé

Gabriel Charmes. Writing in 1886, Charmes urged France’s navy to reequip itself for

guerre de course fought with “microbes.” Small and seemingly insignificant flotillas of

torpedo boats and gunboats would, under the cover of darkness, ambush and destroy

the largest unarmed liners afloat.33 Aube made clear that unlike in the past, ships,

their crews, and cargoes would not be captured but sunk without warning: “Having fol

lowed the liner from afar, come nightfall, the torpedo-boat will, perfectly silently and

quietly send the liner, its cargo, crew, and passengers to the abyss. His soul not only at

ease but fully satisfied, the captain of the torpedo-boat will continue his cruise.”34

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was a vast difference between the Jeune École’s idea of commerce warfare and the 

man practice in 1917–18. The French idea, he wrote, was to panic the British into 

ing hostilities; the German plan, on the other hand, was literally to starve the opp

into submission.35 The distinction is a fair, albeit subtle, one, but other than that, 

Aube-Charmes scheme was no more humane or in closer accord with traditional 

taking rules than the U-boats’ unrestricted “blockade” thirty years later. Raoul C

one of the most innovative French naval strategic thinkers of the inter–world wa

certainly thought that his country, not the Germans, could and should take credi

inventing the idea of unrestricted commerce warfare. Clearly, he wrote, in 1920, 

theory of commerce warfare with torpedoes was not exactly born on the other si

the Rhine. The Germans, as so often, no more than appropriated the invention o

others.”

The Jeune École’s vision of unrestricted commerce warfare came to naught, in pa

when exercises showed that the small (fifty ton) craft that Aube and Charmes env

as the scourges of the seas were simply not up to the task. Wear and tear on men 

matériel made extended operations impossible. True, the turn-of-the-century sub

rine was, if anything, even less qualified to “keep the sea.” Machinery and weapon

quently broke down (the colocation of gasoline engines and unshielded electrica

wiring did not help), the craft was blind when submerged (functional periscopes 

not appear until after 1904), and together these two limitations made the vessel h

accident-prone. Matters were very different, however, on the eve of World War I:

between 1904 and 1914 the submarine had become a reliable and seaworthy navi

tional and weapons-carrying platform. This is not a post facto assessment—in ex

after exercise during the immediate prewar years, “lessons learned” by naval prof

als on both sides of the North Sea highlighted the submarine’s growing high-seas 

and stamina. It is useful to summarize the submarine’s technical progress during 

decade leading up to World War I.

The typical submarine of 1904 displaced about 150 tons; its successor ten years l

was five times larger. Greater hull volume allowed larger, more powerful engines 

batteries, so that speed nearly doubled—from less than ten knots to about sevent

knots on the surface, and from five to ten knots submerged. Even more impressiv

improvements in range and endurance. Thanks to the introduction of the diesel 

and increases in bunker capacity, the surface cruising range of the typical subma

had expanded from 1,000 to1,500 nautical miles in 1904 to 7,500 nautical miles o

more by 1914. When war broke out, design bureaus on both sides had plans for t

oceangoing boats, with cruising ranges of some ten thousand nautical miles. It al

bears mentioning in this connection that the submarine of 1914 exhibited a desi

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had conical hull forms. This was fine as long as the boat was underwater, but on the

surface it made for an extremely unstable platform. The submarine of 1914 had a very

different hull shape, for by that time professional design and operational opinion had

firmly come out in favor of the much more shiplike, “submersible” submarine. It was

double hulled, with a cylindrical inner hull containing the crew, machinery, and stores,

and a free-flooding outer hull providing stability for surface cruising. This shift not

only produced a far more stable platform but improved surface speeds and made the

vessel much stronger. The double-hulled, diesel-electric submersible would dominate

undersea warfare until the introduction of the nuclear-driven submarine in the 1950s.

The submersible spent most of the time on the surface, where it was theoretically more

susceptible to detection. Practically though, the risk was small. Exercises had repeatedly

demonstrated that a submarine in an awash condition—with only the conning tower

out of the water—was extremely difficult to spot. Usually, the submarine made the

“first detection” in plenty of time to disappear below the waves. Nevertheless, partly as

the result of a series of disastrous collisions with surface ships, much was done prior to

the outbreak of World War I to speed up the process of submerging. Some of the early

boats needed as much as fifteen minutes, but by 1914 a diving time of five minutes or

less had become standard for a boat when fully surfaced, about one minute from an

awash condition. When submerged, the average submarine of 1904 could navigate at a

depth of about thirty-five meters; ten years later, fifty meters was common. Even before

the war started, the technology was in hand to operate at the much greater depths that

became the practice by 1917. However, until the invention of the depth charge, there

was no obvious need for doing so.

The submarine’s armament had become more lethal also. Despite its comparatively

high cost and indifferent performance during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905,

the torpedo had become firmly established as the boat’s principal weapon system. The

typical torpedo of 1914 was, like its predecessor of 1904, a “straight-runner,” with

preset guidance provided by a gyroscope. The weight of the warhead on the 1914 torpedo too was not much different from the 1904 model—about two hundred pounds; a

contact fuse was still the only means of triggering the device. Important improvements

had come in speed and striking range. Whereas the “old” torpedoes boasted a (range

dependent) speed of up to twenty knots, the 1914 types attained speeds up to thirty

knots and greater.36 Advertised ranges were up to 2,500 yards, but effective ranges were

closer to some five hundred yards for the typical 1904 model and two thousand for its

1914 successor.37 Even more important for the submarine’s maturation as a high-seas

fighting platform was its much improved weapons payload. The average submarine in

1904 carried two or three torpedoes; six was the norm in 1914.

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about a thousand British pounds sterling.38 This does not sound excessive until it 

realized that this equates to roughly $100,000 today. For this reason, virtually all 

marines on the eve of war carried a deck-mounted gun, typically with a caliber o

three-plus inches. The U-boats were unique in the sense that they were the only

submarines armed with high-elevation guns to fight off aircraft. One other impr

ment that took place between 1904 and 1914 in the submarine’s capability as wea

carrier was in the area of mine warfare. The Russians were the first to build a ded

minelaying submarine, when they laid the keel for Krab in 1908.39 After war brok

the British and Germans followed suit and adapted their submarines for minelay

tasks, first by using the standard torpedo tubes but later by imitating the Russian 

ple and building special-purpose boats fitted with vertical or angled mine “chute

Depending on the size of the submarine, up to two dozen or so mines could be c

The evolution of the submarine from a near-shore, low-endurance defensive wea

an oceangoing offensive platform coincided with the maturation of wireless for r

long-distance communication. In 1904, shipboard radio was still a rarity; ten yea

later, all the major navies had installed sets on large surface combatants and subm

rines. To be sure, these devices still had a limited send-and-receive capability. The

low powered (half a kilowatt to about one kilowatt), which allowed communicat

the medium-frequency band over a distance of some thirty to fifty nautical miles

Very early in the war, however, the Germans found that their equipment was far b

than they themselves had thought. In early 1915, reliable ship-to-shore commun

tions up to 140 nautical miles were possible. Not long afterward, radio contact up 

thousand nautical miles was established, and by the middle of 1915 U-boats mai

tained regular communications with their headquarters in Wilhelmshaven from 

away as the Atlantic and Mediterranean.41 Ironically, the very excellence of the U

radio gear created an unexpected vulnerability, in that it encouraged crews to eng

what Patrick Beesly has called “unduly garrulous” behavior.42 The result was that

ing in late 1914, the code breakers of the British Naval Intelligence Division’s “Ro

40” were able to supply a steady stream of strategic intelligence about the U-boat 

strength and general whereabouts.43 This information was complemented in the 

of 1915 by “radio plots” that marked the location of individual U-boats. These p

were the product of a chain of radio-direction-finding stations that were erected 

the coasts of England and Ireland. Fixes, based on the intersection of at least two r

bearings, were accurate to within a radius of twenty to fifty nautical miles.44 This ki

information would prove extremely useful for the routing of convoys, but it rarely, 

was accurate or timely enough to bring about a successful tactical prosecution by a

“hunter-killer” sloop or destroyer.

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its forerunner at the turn of the century. It had evolved from a mechanically unreliable

and slow coastal-defense platform that could stay at sea for only a few days with less

than a handful of not-so-accurate weapons to a true oceangoing craft that could stay

out for weeks and use a combination of mines, torpedoes, and gunfire to endanger

shipping anywhere between midocean and home port. During the same period, and

even though naval professionals on both sides of the impending conflict were acutely

aware of the “modern” submarine’s potential, nothing to speak of had been accomplished with respect to countermeasures. Later in the war, when the U-boats seemed

frightfully close to their goal of economic strangulation, Britain’s chief of naval staff

lamely defended the prewar failure to innovate against the submarine by suggesting

there had been no pressing need at the time. “It should be remembered,” he said, “that

the submarine was in its infancy at the outbreak of war.”45 The problem was that if the

U-boat had been in 1914 in its “infancy,” antisubmarine warfare had yet to be born.

“As for the U-boats, the Admiralty Says Little but Does Much”

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the Royal Navy boasted the

world’s most numerous submarine fleet—seventy-seven boats.46 France, with some

sixty, took second place. Germany, by contrast, owned a grand total of only twentyeight. Several were already obsolete, but the ten last-built boats (U-19 through U-28)

were, without a doubt, superior to any foreign-built submarine. Sixteen additional

U-boats were under construction, and additional orders were placed between August

and November.47 If the diminutive size of this force alone is not proof that Germany’s

naval planners were not then thinking in terms of a major war against commerce, the

following may be: almost until the very day war was declared, Germany’s largest

U-boat yard, the Germaniawerft, was negotiating—with the approval of the naval

staff—with the Greek government over the sale of five U-boats then on order for Germany’s own navy.48

Limited numbers accounted for one reason why it took some time for the submarine’s

revolutionary impact on war to be registered. The other reason was that during the firs

six months of the war, Germany used the U-boats mostly according to the “old,”

prerevolutionary rules of sea warfare. That is to say, they were employed as “legitimate”

weapons war against “legitimate” targets of war—the enemy’s fleet. Since this was precisely what the British had expected all along, the results, though dramatic on occasion

fell far short of the German goal of creating a more even balance of dreadnought

power. For one thing, the Grand Fleet gave the U-boats few opportunities to stalk and

attack its battleships. The fleet retreated to its anchorage at Scapa Flow in northernmost Scotland, whence it made occasional sweeps into the North Sea. The daily routine

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and destroyers. Many of these were older vessels, but even so they were usually fa

than submarines and therefore difficult to approach for a favorable torpedo-firin

position. Of course, the very fact that fear of mines and submarines had compell

Royal Navy’s battleships to vacate the narrow seas was itself an indication that th

Mahanian verity that command of the sea rested with the biggest ships had lost m

of its meaning. The new asymmetric nature of war at sea became dramatically ev

on 22 September 1914. On that day, a single submarine managed to sink, within 

hour, three armored cruisers—Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue—on routine patrol in 

North Sea. More than 2,500 men died, more than at Trafalgar. Julian Corbett rec

after the war that “nothing that had yet occurred had so emphatically proclaimed 

change that had come over naval warfare, and never perhaps had so great a result 

obtained by means relatively so small.”49

The disproportionate effect of the handful of U-boats in 1914 on the world’s mo

powerful battle fleet showed in a warning from Jellicoe to his subordinate comm

that should the Grand and High Sea fleets meet for the much-desired decisive ba

the enemy might feign a tactical retreat with the objective of drawing the Grand 

into a mine or submarine trap.50 In later battle orders, which were in force at Jutl

Jellicoe spelled out the operational and, for that matter, strategic implications of 

concern: should the enemy “turn away” his line of battle, he wrote, “it may be ex

that I shall not follow a decided turn of this nature . . . as I should anticipate that 

made for the purpose of taking us over submarines.”51

The loss of Aboukir, Cressy, Hogue, and, a couple of weeks earlier, the cruiser Path

evidently impressed the British more than the Germans. While the German nava

ership was pleased with this dramatic demonstration of the U-boat’s war-fightin

bilities, it was also acutely aware that sinking older cruisers would not get it close

“der Tag” with a roughly even balance of battle-fleet forces. If anything, the Britis

cruiser losses had made the chances of a decisive battle on German terms even le

likely, for the sinking of Pathfinder had caused Jellicoe to take the Grand Fleet to 

even more distant anchorage on the northwest coast of Scotland.52 In a memoran

of 28 December 1914, Kapitän zur See Zenker of the naval staff set forth the impl

tions for Germany’s naval strategy in general and the role of the U-boats in parti

It has been demonstrated that our submarines have not succeeded now for a long time in gain

results worthy of note, despite the fact that they have been making cruises for a long time and 

carried them out with great boldness. In the future prosecution of the war we will therefore be 

count neither on an equality of strength before the battle due to the use of our light forces nor 

opponent’s changing his strategy as long as we continue ours unchanged.53

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could Germany make? In particular, how could the U-boats’ surprising war-fighting

potential be put to better use? The answer depended, in part, of course, on Germany’s

overall strategic goals at sea. If a modern-day Trafalgar was still the goal, Zenker’s suggestion of closer tactical cooperation with the High Sea Fleet’s battleships might be the

solution. Zenker thought that a better strategy of reducing the Grand Fleet’s numbers

prior to a decisive battle might be to use the High Sea Fleet as bait and then trap the

British in a forward screen of submarines. After these had taken their toll, the High Sea

Fleet would be in a position to fight its battle on much more even terms.54

Zenker’s scheme of using the U-boats in support of a decisive battle might have made

some sense in the early days of the war, when it was popularly expected that the troops

would be home by Christmas.55 From the German perspective, this happy outcome was

predicated on the rapid occurrence of at least two decisive battles—one on land that

would break the back of the French army, and the other at sea against the British fleet.

Come Christmas, though, it had become patently obvious that this would be a long war,

both on land and at sea.

Stalemate on land and at sea, along with the prospect of a long conflict in which economic and financial endurance would overshadow prowess on the battlefield as the

arbiter of war, set the stage for a major and fateful redefinition of Germany’s submarine strategy. Thanks to the invention of the submarine, commerce warfare, so long dis

dained by naval strategists in and out of uniform as “a delusion, and a most dangerous

delusion,” displaced the “decisive battle” as the centerpiece of naval strategic thinking.

The immediate trigger for the three-month-long debate that followed between Germany’s naval and political leadership was a British announcement, on 2 October 1914,

that in order to protect cross-Channel traffic against U-boats, the eastern approaches

had been barred with a minefield.56 During the first month after the declaration, 2,764

mines were planted; another 4,390 were laid during the first two weeks of February the

following year.57

A Denkschrift (memorandum) by the commander of the U-boot forces, Korevettenkapitän Hermann Bauer, framed Germany’s fateful debate. He called for immediate

retaliation by using the underwater weapon against British commerce.58 His superior

officers at the High Sea Fleet and on the admiralty staff were sympathetic. The commander of the 2nd Battle Squadron, Admiral Reinholdt Scheer, insisted that if this new

and powerful weapon was going to be used to full effect, it must be done “in the way

most suited to its peculiarities”—that is, without warning and without sparing the

crews of the victimized steamers.59 But while the navy’s uniformed leadership were naturally focused on the potential military effectiveness of a ship-sinking offensive, the

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cially the reaction of the neutral countries, first and foremost the United States. I

rial chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg told the navy that there were n

objections to a commerce campaign but that a decision to go ahead should await 

stronger German military position on land. In the event, Germany need not wor

the neutrals might react. Scheer’s comment written after the war fairly sums up t

navy’s frustration: “Enemies on all sides! That was the situation.”60

The pressure to find an alternative military solution to the stalemate on land co

ued. In the Reichstag, Bethmann-Hollweg came under strong criticism for hind

the U-boats and being soft on the British.61 The press too clamored for retaliati

against Britain’s “illegal” blockade.62 On 21 November Grossadmiral Alfred von

Tirpitz, the “father” of the High Sea Fleet, asked an American reporter the rhet

question whether Germany did not have as much right as the British opponent 

“starve us out” and retaliate “by torpedoing any of their ships and their Allies’ sh

Bethmann-Hollweg reluctantly conceded on 1 February 1915. The High Sea Flee

commander in chief, Admiral von Pohl, had assured him that the U-boats would 

no difficulty telling enemy from neutral vessels and that just to make sure, very s

rules of engagement (ROE) would be issued.64 Two days later, the announcement 

that, starting 18 February, all the waters around the British Isles and the Channel 

be a “war zone,” in which all enemy ships would be destroyed and neutrals wou

“navigate at their peril.”65 American protests quickly compelled the Germans to

exempt all neutral vessels, hospital ships, and vessels of the Commission for th

Relief of Belgium.66

The U-boats’ restrictive ROE effectively forestalled the kind of anti-commerce cam

originally envisaged. Strategically, the exemption of neutrals meant that roughly 

percent of British seagoing trade was immune from attack. Tactically, this transla

into a much less target-rich environment for the U-boats. Also, the requirement 

the U-boat commander make sure of the national identity of a ship before it cou

sunk made his task much more complicated. On the one hand, the captain’s instr

tions told him that his “first consideration is the safety of the submarine.”67 Yet th

ROE also told him he could carry out his mission only after he had come to the s

and made a positive identification of the ship’s nationality at close range (within en

gun range).68 It did not take the British long to exploit this contradiction.

The U-boat order of battle at the beginning of what became known as the “first o

sive” stood at about thirty, a small net increase since the start of the war.69 Even th

small number practically overstates the size of the force that was given the task o

bringing Britain to the bargaining table. To begin with, not all boats were availab

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undergoing refit and repair. Next, up to twelve boats were initially withheld for the

defense of the High Sea Fleet’s home waters.70 This meant that once the offensive got

under way, no more than twenty-four boats were available. According to Scheer, this

translated into three or four standing patrols astride Britain’s main trade routes.71

It is not surprising that, given this small number and ROE that effectively forced the

U-boats to fight a “prize war” according to prerevolutionary Mahanian rules of war on

the sea, the return in merchant shipping sunk in the first offensive was not impressive:

154 British vessels were lost to U-boats between February and the end of September.72

Fortunately for the Germans, U-boat losses were small as well; nineteen were lost during the same period, but only thirteen of those have definitely been attributed to hostile action of one sort or another.73 This result is somewhat surprising when it is

realized that 120 of the 154 ships that fell victim were “captured”—that is, sunk

according to the prize rules. This means that almost 80 percent of the (successful)

attacks occurred with the U-boat stationary and fully exposed on the surface. Corbett’s

authorized history of the war at sea took note how the relatively low shipping losses

during this first U-boat offensive led many to believe that the “defence had mastered

the attack.”74 The truth is that the failure of the first offensive had far less to do with the

efficiency of British defensive measures than the U-boats’ self-imposed restrictions.

Notes

1. The chapter title is from Boston Journal, 2

June 1901, cited in Alan H. Burgoygne, Submarine Navigation Past and Present (New

York: E. P. Dutton, 1903), vol. 2, p. 350.

2. Cited in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

[hereafter USNIP] (March 1899), p. 247.

3. Gérard Garier, L’odyssée technique et humaine

du sous-marin en France, Tome 1: Du

Plongeur (1863) aux Guêpe (1904) (Bourg en

Bresse, Fr.: Marines edition, 1995).

4. USNIP (June 1900), p. 380.

5. Cited in “Successful Trials of the Holland

Submarine Boat,” USNIP (December 1899),

p. 925.

6. Cited in Nicholas Lambert, The Submarine

Service, 1900–1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate for

the Navy Records Society, 2001), p. 11.

7. Senior Naval Lord, minute, 4 May 1900, cited

in ibid., p. 8.

8. William Laird Clowes, the author of a seven

volume history of the Royal Navy, commented at the time that, experimentation

being the purpose, there was little point in

going ahead with the purchase. Why risk officers and crew, he asked, when technology

was about to allow the creation of remotely

controlled, unmanned vessels and weapons,

called “actinauts”? William Laird Clowes,

The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest

Times to 1900 (London: Sampson Low,

Marston, 1903; repr. Chatham, 1997), vol. 7

p. 62.

9. Willem Hackmann, Seek & Strike: Sonar,

Anti-submarine Warfare and the Royal Navy

1914–54 (London: H.M. Stationery Off.,

1984), pp. 7–10.

10. Admiral Bacon reports in his post–World

War I account of his command of the “Dover Patrol” how, before the war, mines were

“viewed askance . . . since we, the strongest

Power, always fostered the idea that it was

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out and fight, and not block him in.” Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, The Dover Patrol

1915–1917 (London: Hutchinson, 1919), vol.

1, p. 109.

11. Capt. J. S. Cowie, Mines, Minelayers and

Minelaying (London: Oxford Univ. Press,

1949), p. 31.

12. Dwight R. Messimer, Find and Destroy: Antisubmarine Warfare in World War I

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press,

2001), pp. 51–55.

13. Ibid., pp. 55–56.

14. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, memorandum, 5th edition printed May 1914, cited in

Lambert, Submarine Service 1900–1918,

p. 215.

15. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1043B, P. II, “Distribution of British Naval

Forces in Outlaying Stations in Relation to

the Protection of British Maritime Commerce in War with Germany,” handwritten

note, “Anticipated German Operations of

War.” The ADM files at the British National

Archives (formerly known as Public Record

Office) refer to Admiralty records.

16. Admiral Sir Percy Scott, Fifty Years in the

Royal Navy (London: John Murray, 1919),

pp. 287–88.

17. According to the Declaration of London of

1909, enemy civilian shipping could be destroyed only after crew and passengers had

been placed in safety—which meant, in practical terms, placed on board the warship.

Neutral ships, if caught with contraband on

board, could not be destroyed but could be

taken as prizes. See Messimer, Find and Destroy, p. 4.

18. Cited in Lambert, Submarine Service 1900–

1918, p. 232. Interestingly, Fisher himself

thought that, between its geographic disadvantages and its much smaller merchant

fleet, Germany was much more vulnerable to

Britain’s submarine fleet than vice versa.

19. Captain Herbert S. Richmond—later Admiral Richmond and prominent naval commentator—reportedly cited the submarine’s

technical difficulties in abiding by the prize

laws as evidence that it made a poor commerce raider. Reported in Arthur J. Marder,

From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), vol. 1, p. 364,

cited in Angus Ross, “Losing the Initiative in

Surprising Failure to Anticipate Mar

Challenges to Her Global Trading Ne

in the First World War,” Internationa

nal of Naval History 1, no. 1 (April 20

available at www.ijnhonline.org.

20. Admiralty note, 30 April 1905, cited 

Ruddock F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverst

(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1973), p. 3

21. Cited in Archibald Hurd, The Mercha

(London: John Murray, 1921), vol. 1

22. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 

1043B, Pt. 1, “War Plan—Germany. W

II, ‘Anticipated German Operations 

23. Ibid.

24. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 

2831, Trade Division Records: Losses o

chant Ships, “Memorandum on Poss

Losses to British Commerce in an An

German War,” 28 May 1914.

25. Col. à Court Repington, “New Wars 

Old: I. The Submarine Menace,” Bla

wood’s Magazine (June 1910), cited in 

www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/flippy.

=blackwoodsmagazi187edinuoft.

26. Ibid.

27. Lambert, Submarine Service 1900–19

125–26.

28. Admiral Scheer, Germany’s High Sea 

the World War (London: Cassell, 192

p. xiii.

29. For example, in an article in the Aug

issue of the Deutsche Revue, retired v

miral Freiherr von Schleinitz urged t

building of a fleet of large U-boats c

of sinking English merchant ships. D

he wrote, would be “much more sign

than defeating the opponent in a nav

tle.” Von Schleinitz, “Der Außen- un

Kleinkrieg zur See und seine Bedeutu

Deutschland,” Deutsche Revue 33, no

(1908), pp. 132–49, cited in Joachim

Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers (B

Bernard and Graefe Verlag, 2003), pp

30. A few months before the outbreak of 

certain Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant

Ulrich-Eberhard Blum of the navy’s 

rine Inspectorate at Kiel published a 

randum estimating that a minimum 

submarines were needed to underta

effective blockade against Britain. Blu

calculation proved surprisingly presc

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matter was not yet ripe for discussion.

Arno Spindler, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918:

Der Handelskrieg mit U-booten, vol. 1, Vorgeschichte (Berlin: E. S. Mittler and Son, 1932)

cited in Carl-Axel Gemzell, Organization,

Conflict, and Innovation: A Study of German

Naval Strategic Planning, 1888–1940 (Stockholm: Esselte Studium, 1973), p. 62.

31. None of the “standard” sources on German

pre–World War I military or naval planning

report the existence of operational or contingency plans for a large-scale U-boat commerce war. See Gemzell, Organization,

Conflict, and Innovation; Paul M. Kennedy,

“The Development of German Naval Operations Plans against England, 1896–1914,” The

War Plans of the Great Powers 1880–1914, ed.

Kennedy (London: Unwin Hyman, 1979),

pp. 171–98; and Ivo Nikolai Lambdi, The

Navy and German Power Politics, 1862–1914

(Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984).

32. Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press,

1987), pp. 155–80.

33. Gabriel Charmes, La réforme de la marine

(Paris: Ancienne Maison Michel Lévy Frères,

1868), pp. 124–25, cited in Capitaine de

frégate Raoul Castex, Synthèse de la Guerre

Sous-Marine de Pontchartrain à Tirpiz (Paris:

Librairie Maritime et Coloniale, 1920), p. 26.

34. Admiral Aube in L’Atlas Coloniale (1889),

cited in Castex.

35. Ropp, Development of a Modern Navy, p. 170.

36. The improvement in torpedo speed became

possible when the switch was made, around

1905, to superheated compressed air instead

of cold air for propulsion. See Geoff Kirby,

“A History of the Torpedo in the Early Days,”

Journal of the Royal Navy Scientific Service,

vol. 27:1, pp. 19–20. The article can be found

on http://www.btinernet.com/~philipr/torps

.htm.

37. See Louis C. Gerken, Torpedo Technology

(Chula Vista, Calif.: American Scientific

Corp., 1989), esp. pp. 1–36; and Eberhard

Rössler, The U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press,

1981), p. 344.

38. E. M. Cumming, “A Short History of Torpedoes 1866–1944,” Weymouth Diving Web,

p. 12.

39. Krab was not completed until 1915. See Jan

S. Breemer, Soviet Submarines: Design, Development, and Tactics (Coulsdon, U.K.:

Jane’s Information Group, 1989), pp. 22–23

40. See Arthur Hezlet, Electronics and Sea Power

(New York: Stein and Day, 1975), pp. 97,

298. Also, Lt. C. W. Nimitz, “Military Value

and Tactics of Modern Submarines,” USNIP

(December 1912), p. 1194.

41. Korvettenkapitän Albert Bauer, Die

Deutschen U-boote in ihrer Kriegsführung

1914–1918, vol. 2, Die U-Bootsblockade

Februar bis Oktober 1915 (Berlin: E. S.

Mittler and Son, 1920), pp. 14–15, 41. The

author had commanded the High Sea Fleet’s

3rd U-boat Flotilla.

42. Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelli

gence 1914–1918 (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1982), p. 30.

43. Ibid., p. 91. Also, Robert M. Grant, U-boat

Intelligence 1914–1918 (Hamden, Conn.:

Archon Books, 1969), pp. 17–18.

44. Beesly, Room 40, p. 254.

45. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM116/

1430, Report on the Present Organisation of

the Board of Invention and Research [better

known as the Holland Report, after its main

contributor, Sir R. Sothern Holland].

46. The subheading is from Punch (London),

July 1917. Reprinted in Mr. Punch’s History

of the Great War (London: Cassell and Co.,

1919), p. 163.

47. Robert M. Grant, U-boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare 1914–1918

(London: Putnam, 1964), pp. 17–18.

48. Rössler, U-boat, p. 36.

49. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Naval Operations (Lon

don: Longmans, Green, 1921), vol. 1, p. 182.

50. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1341, Grand Fleet Battle Orders August 1914–

May 31st 1916, “Grand Fleet Battle Orders

amendment of 23/2/15.”

51. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1341, Grand Fleet Battle Orders August 1914–

May 31st 1916, “Grand Fleet Battle Orders in

Force at Battle of Jutland May 31st 1916.”

52. Ibid., p. 80.

53. Koervettenkapitän D. Groos, Der Krieg in der

Nordsee, vol. 3, Von Ende November 1914 bis

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and Son, 1922), app. 3, “Gedanken über die

zukünftige Führung des Seekrieges” [Thoughts

on the Future Conduct of the Naval War],

p. 263.

54. Ibid.

55. The dominant expectation among professional military men and the public alike that

this would be a short war is reflected in, for

example, the British plan of 1912 for the

wartime use of the country’s shipbuilding resources. It was predicated on a six-month

conflict. See P. Haggie, “The Royal Navy and

War Planning in the Fisher Era,” in War

Plans of the Great Powers 1880–1914, ed.

Kennedy, p. 130. Admiral of the Fleet Lord

Chatfield later recalled how nearly everyone

believed the war would not last long, for “the

financiers told us, and they must know; they

had lectured us as had the economists in our

war courses.” Admiral of the Fleet Lord

Chatfield, The Navy and Defence (London:

William Heinemann, 1942), p. 120.

56. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Naval Operations, vol. 1,

p. 182. The prospective arrival of U-boats at

the German-occupied Belgian harbors of

Zeebrugge and Ostend was, no doubt, a major factor in the British decision. On 9 November 1914 the first U-boat (U-12) arrived

at Zeebrugge. The “Flanders U-boat Flotilla”

was formally stood up on 15 March 1915

and at one point counted thirty-seven submarines. See Johan Ryheul, “The Flandern

U-boat Bases and U-Bootflottille Flandern,”

Uboat.net 1995–2010. The report can be

found on http://www.uboat.net.

57. Günter Krause, U-Boot Alarm: Zur

Geschichte der U-Boot-Abwehr (1914–1945)

(Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagshaus,

1998), p. 34.

58. Gemzell, Organization, Conflict, and Innovation, p. 142.

59. Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World

War, p. 222.

60. Ibid., p. 223.

61. Messimer, Find and Destroy, p. 16.

rine commerce raiding, see Gemzell, 

zation, Conflict, and Innovation, p. 14

63. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Naval Operation

don: Longmans, Green, 1921), vol. 2

64. Messimer, Find and Destroy, p. 17.

65. Ibid.

66. Grant, U-boats Destroyed, p. 21.

67. John Terrain, The U-boat Wars 1916–

(New York: Henry Holt, 1989), p. 9.

68. The controversy over how much risk 

be accepted in order to ensure discri

tive targeting continues—witness the 

temporary debate over the trade-off 

(expensive) precision bombing and t

minimization of collateral damage.

69. Grant, U-boats Destroyed (p. 20), calc

an order of battle of thirty; Paul G. H

A Naval History of World War I (Ann

Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 2

ports a total thirty-seven, with twent

available for blockade duties; Scheer 

in Germany’s High Sea Fleet (p. 257) 

about twenty-four were available; an

Rössler’s U-boat (p. 47) asserts that t

seven boats were available on 1 April

70. Arno Spindler, Der Krieg zur See 1914

Der Handelskrieg mit U-Booten, vol. 

Februar bis September 1915 (Berlin: E

Mittler and Son, 1933; trans. Naval W

lege as The War at Sea, 1914–1918: T

marine War on Commerce [Newport, 

Department of Intelligence and Rese

1934]), chap. 1, p. 3.

71. Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in t

World War, p. 257.

72. Merchant Shipping (Losses) (London: 

Stationery Off., 1919), reprinted in B

Vessels Lost at Sea 1914–18, Section II

chant Shipping (Losses) (Cambridge, 

Patrick Stevens, 1977), pp. 4–11. The 

ber is somewhat higher if losses due 

mines laid by U-boats are included.

73. Grant, U-boats Destroyed, pp. 11–16.

74. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Naval Operation

don: Longmans, Green, 1923), vol. 3

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Cutting the Thin Thread

When he wrote the official British history of the war at sea, Corbett noted that T

November 1914 interview seemed an empty threat at the time, one that required 

special measures.”1

In reality, as it became increasingly evident that the war woul

at least another year and that the U-boats’ activities would amount to more than 

sance, “special measures” were in fact taken. They were of two kinds. The first we

immediate measures using existing technologies and capabilities to, if not destro

submerged enemy, at least limit his freedom of maneuver and effectiveness. Thes

would, it was hoped, keep the U-boats’ depredations to a tolerable level, while sci

and technology tried to find a long-term solution by way of new kinds of weapon

more important, means of detection. Underlying this overall strategy was the ass

tion that the only way to defeat the U-boat menace was by sinking it.

Immediate measures taken on the eve of the U-boats’ first offensive started with 

division of Britain’s home waters into twenty-three patrol zones, each guarded by 

lection of “low-tech” patrol vessels—trawlers, drifters, private yachts.2

The Dover 

quickly became one of the war’s most important organizations of the kind. This 

fleet—which later became the “Auxiliary Patrol”—was at first charged only with

reporting a suspected submarine to the nearest “Naval Centre.” This site would th

contact the closest naval forces for the actual pursuit and engagement. The probl

was that should a patrol be lucky enough to spot a U-boat, it probably would not 

a radio. Even if it did, the chances were small that enough destroyers would be ne

enough to respond in time to pick up the hunt. Consequently, the patrols themse

were eventually turned into hunters, first with guns and later depth charges. In te

numbers, the scale of the effort was massive; in January 1915 more than eight hu

auxiliary patrol vessels plied Britain’s coastal waters. As far as is known, however, 

three U-boats fell victim to their activities during the entire war.3

Drifters and yachts were also enlisted in the establishment of an elaborate barrie

mines and “Bircham indicator nets” across the Strait of Dover. The idea here was 

CHAPTER TWO

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the Irish Sea. During the first two weeks of February more than 4,300 mines were

planted between Dunkirk and the Thames estuary.4

Next, the fields were complemented

by some sixteen miles of indicator nets. Made of wide-mesh steel wire, the nets had two

purposes: first, they would, it was hoped, act as a trip wire for the vessels patrolling

above. The idea was that a penetrating submarine would tear off a portion of the net,

entangle itself, and betray its position by dragging the attached buoys. The alerted

patrol vessel was then supposed to ram or bomb the hapless U-boat. Alternatively, a

“smart” U-boat commander who tried to avoid the nets would do so by diving into the

mines below.

The “Dover Barrage,” as it came to be known, had mixed results. To begin with, it was

soon realized that the indicator nets could not stand up to the Channel’s strong currents

and stormy weather (as Admiral Bacon put it, “It is one thing to theorise and devise

obstructions at a drawing board, calculating the statical stresses, and another to see tha

structure in a seaway with a strong tide running”).5

Nets were repeatedly cut loose,

requiring constant maintenance and repair. Plans were then made to add stronger submarine nets, but most of the materials were diverted to operations in the Dardanelles

in March 1915; the work really did not get under way until September.6

The mines had

their own share of problems. It was not long before both sides were aware that British

sea mines often looked more intimidating than they were in fact. The moorings were

weak, so that the devices had a habit of breaking loose in even moderately adverse

weather (and endangering friendly shipping as a result), and the firing devices were

notoriously unreliable.7

Not until 1917—thanks to the technical assistance of Britain’s

Russian ally—was the production of an effective family of mines taken in hand.8

The barrier’s technical shortfalls were aggravated by the British failure to support its

static portion with adequate patrol forces. As long as the Grand Fleet had first call on

the most capable destroyers, patrols that were supposed to watch for intruders

remained short on both quality and quantity.9To make matters worse, until late 1917

the patrols kept their watches only in daylight hours and during the good season—that

is, May to November. The indicator nets too had to be pulled in at night.10 As a result,

the Dover Barrage could claim only a single U-boat before November 1917, when

better mines, some based on captured German designs, became available and aroundthe-clock patrols were established.

The British were aware of the barrage’s problems by the spring of 1915. It did not take

the Germans much longer, but for a while, after one U-boat had gotten caught in the

netting, the barrage served as a fairly effective deterrent. Namely, the Heligoland-based

U-boats were instructed to sail for patrol stations in the Irish Sea by way of the much

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was not particularly proficient as a system for destroying submarines, it did cont

to the ASW effort by restricting the U-boat’s productivity.11

As the British struggled to come to grips with the new weapon of war by convent

methods, they were increasingly compelled to resort to unconventional tactics. S

these tactics arguably violated prevailing customs and rules of war at sea. The arm

of merchantmen for specifically offensive anti-U-boat operations is a case in poi

Consistent with British plans before the war, selected civilian ships were armed w

guns immediately at the start of hostilities; the expectation then still was that so-

first-class liners would be attractive targets for armed surface raiders. The progra

picked up speed when it became evident that the U-boats had shifted focus from 

imate” warships to merchant vessels. By the end of 1915, 766 merchantmen had b

armed with guns.12 Although the British government had assured neutrals that th

weapons were for self-defense only and would not be fired unless the vessels carr

them were fired upon, confidential instructions called for a merchantman to ope

if its master decided that a spotted U-boat had hostile intentions, even if it had n

fired a weapon.13 Gun crews were uniformed Royal Navy personnel.14 In practice, 

use of armed merchant steamers as U-boat killers was a failure; not a single boat 

sunk in this manner. From a different and broader point of view, however, the ta

had some value: U-boats were more likely to break off an encounter and leave th

when they encountered resistance. As a consequence, an armed merchantman wa

likely to be attacked and sunk than an unarmed vessel.15

Decoy, or “mystery,” ships were another step in the “militarization” of civilian sh

Also known as “Q-ships,” these were freighters and colliers manned by Royal Navy 

and fitted with concealed guns but deliberately camouflaged to look harmless. So

sailed under neutral flags. Under a program begun in November 1914, the purpo

to lure an unsuspecting U-boat—still fighting according to the Prize Regulations

approaching close enough to send a boarding party to row across and inspect the 

ifest and then, while the submarine was at its most vulnerable, suddenly open fir

nearly two hundred British decoy vessels that saw service during the war were res

ble for the destruction of altogether thirteen U-boats.16 They paid a high price ho

thirty-eight Q-ships were lost to various forms of hostile action.17

A more sophisticated ruse involved the combination of an “innocent” trawler an

marine. The idea was that the trawler, with a submerged British submarine in tow

would be approached by a U-boat. The trawler would signal the underwater esco

a telephone line that ran along the towline, then cast off the tow so the submarin

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ful cases of this early form of submarine-against-submarine combat.18

“A Struggle of Inventions”

At least as important as the submarine’s revolutionary impact on the nature and conduct of war at sea was its contribution to the gradual blurring of the traditional dividing line between combatants and noncombatants.19 “Total war” has been one of the

distinguishing characteristics of warfare since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Germans took the first step with the declaration that British merchant vessels were

now to be sunk without warning; the British responded, further obscuring the distinction between “targetable” military combatants and “nontargetable” civilians, by effectively encouraging armed merchant vessels to defend themselves “actively.” By the end

of the war, after both sides had turned to bombing the opponent’s towns and cities rou

tinely from the sea or from the air, few of the old, preindustrial-warfare inhibitions

against the killing of civilians and destruction of their property were left. In the next

world war, the immunity of noncombatants from deliberate military violence would

not even be an issue.

Equally portentous for the future was the role the U-boat now played in changing the

relationship between science and war. As the first phase in the U-boats’ campaign to

cut Britain’s sea lines of communications unfolded, even the most optimistic of the

Royal Navy’s planners had to admit that nets, ramming, and mines, originally meant to

sink surface ships, were simply not good enough for dealing with a submarine threat

that was becoming more potent by the day. They constituted a makeshift defense whos

success depended largely on chance and surprise. It had been thrown together to contain the danger long enough for the issue to be settled quickly elsewhere, either by the

armies on land or at sea between two battle fleets. When it became evident that Germany’s shipyards had embarked on a massive submarine-building program, there could

be little doubt that the U-boats would be much more than a tactical nuisance that,

albeit after some difficulties, could be dealt with in stride by the navy’s professionals.20

At hand instead was a strategic problem that defied the tried-and-proven methods of

war on the sea. If the submarine represented a novel form of warfare, a systematic

defensive effort for the long haul called for equally novel countermeasures whose

nature lay as yet outside the experience of the professional naval officer. It might be

true that science could do little to help win a “short” war, but without a scientific commitment to solving the submarine problem, the end of the war might well come too

soon, at least from the British point of view. Hints that Germany’s military prowess wa

indebted in good part to what was believed to be strong collaboration between its

military and its centers of scientific research spurred the British into action.

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lished, with the goal of closer integration between the country’s war-connected i

tries and scientific talent. A similar arrangement with a focus on the navy’s

technological needs was set up within the Admiralty. Named the Board of Invent

and Research (BIR), it was made responsible for “assuring for the Admiralty, dur

continuance of the war, expert assistance in organizing and encouraging scientifi

effort in relation to the requirements of the Naval Services.”21 Its first chairman w

Admiral “Jackie” Fisher, who a few months earlier had resigned as First Sea Lord

Fisher, of course, had been one of the few voices before the war warning of the su

rine as the up-and-coming weapon of sea warfare. Other members eventually inc

some four dozen scientists in different fields, most notably the Nobel Prize–winn

physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford. They were organized into six science and techno

sections, of which Section II, Submarines and Wireless Telegraphy, quickly assum

greatest prominence.23 During its two-year existence, 14,655, or more than a thir

the 41,127 “inventions” submitted to the board for screening dealt with submari

antisubmarine defenses, or wireless telegraphy.24

That said, it is difficult to tell how much the BIR’s work actually contributed to a 

tific solution of the submarine problem. One difficulty is that the board’s work w

mainly preoccupied with evaluating the ideas and inventions of others and fundi

those it found deserving. Evidently the BIR rarely initiated its own research proje

Section II’s most productive work was reportedly done on acoustic research. Thi

received by far the lion’s share of the BIR’s expenditures on research grants, £17,0

This does not strike us today like a particularly generous amount, especially whe

realized that a battleship cost about three million pounds to build, or 175 times a

much. It could be, of course, that, given this was scientific terra incognita, more l

ous funding could not have been spent productively. In any case, many of the fin

of the BIR’s acoustic research would be the basis of postwar work, but it had littl

tical significance for the primitive hydrophone systems built during the First Wo

War. A more immediate contribution to the anti-U-boat effort came from the w

of Section II scientists attached to the navy’s hydrophone experimental station at

Hawkcraig, in northern Scotland. Here the navy’s first-generation portable

hydrophones were developed.26

The BIR was abolished in September 1917 and its work moved to a newly establi

Central Research Establishment, which was overseen by a newly created Admiral

Department of Experiments and Research (DER). The change came in the wake 

cabinet-commissioned “Holland Report” on the navy’s ASW research efforts.27 In 

scathing criticism of the service’s lack of prewar preparedness to deal with the su

rine, the report noted that “science is only now called in to explore these fields [o

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the problem is now being grappled with sufficient earnestness or with sufficient vigour.”2

At the root of the report’s criticism of what its authors saw as the disappointing progress of the navy’s scientific battle against the submarine were the “birthing pangs” that

accompanied the birth of the revolutionary new partnership between the world of the

military and that of the civilian scientists. The two shared the same objective, but their

problem-solving approaches were very different. As the historian of the British navy’s

early sonar research has explained, there was a fundamental clash of attitudes, which

pitted the navy’s insistence on pragmatic, trial-and-error research and development

against the BIR’s insistence on fundamental research. The service’s philosophy was one

of “satisficing”—finding and going ahead with solutions that, if not perfect, were good

enough. The scientists, by contrast, tended to look for the best possible results—theirs

was a “value-maximizing” philosophy. Both approaches had their strengths and weaknesses. The navy’s more practical approach could sometimes produce results very rapidly; with a war on, waiting for the perfect solution—which might not even exist—

could spell disaster. More often, though, this pragmatism resulted in costly failures and

waste of resources that, from the scientists’ perspective, could have been put to better

use in a search for solutions grounded in scientifically “sound” research.

One consequence of this disagreement on how the insights of science should be applied

to the immediate operational problems of war was a mutual lack of sympathy for the

other side’s needs and contributions. The scientists did not always understand the real

world of fleet operations, which bore little resemblance to the carefully controlled envi

ronment of the laboratory or test range. Conversely, the navy was not always very

forthcoming with the kinds of operational data the scientists needed or eager to divert

its war-fighting assets, such as ships, for “impractical” experimental purposes.

In Britain and elsewhere after the war, drastic cuts in military expenditures were to

bring a substantial scaling-back of the still-embryonic partnership between the military

and science. Twenty years later, many of the lessons that had been learned would have

to be relearned to fight another world war. Nevertheless, the most important lesson wa

taken to heart: the balance of military power in future wars, be it at sea, on land, or,

now, in the air, would depend as much on the innovativeness of an organized program

of science and research as it did on numbers or divisions or fleets of ships. The struggle

to defuse the revolutionary impact of the submarine on the old and familiar “rules” of

war at sea during World War I served to change forever the historically “standoffish”

relationship between science and the military. Before World War I, important technological innovations had almost always been introduced into the military—frequently

reluctantly—because of the push of inventors in the civilian world. Thus, none of the

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whether the torpedo, wireless, the aircraft, or the submarine itself—made its app

ance in response to a defined military “need.” Now, the inability of the familiar,

prerevolutionary means of sea fighting to cope with the submarine and, perhaps 

important, the incapacity of navies to find solutions inside their own institution

pelled them to turn to the research and development “community” and pull for

solutions.29

On 18 September 1915, the German navy’s new chief of staff, Vice Admiral Henn

von Holtzendorff, ordered the cessation of all anti-merchant operations in the En

Channel and off Britain’s west coast. The tonnage-sinking campaign would conti

the North and Mediterranean seas, but only according to the Prize Regulations. T

decision came in the wake of an acrimonious debate among Germany’s naval and 

tary leadership, on the one hand, and the emperor and his foreign policy adviser

the other. At issue was how to continue fighting the commerce war against Britai

the face of mounting U.S. pressure over its conduct. The emperor had “suggested

a shift in operational focus from Britain’s western approaches to the Mediterrane

would minimize the chance of further diplomatic complications with the United 

The naval leadership was left with little choice; vacating the principal “funnels” o

ain’s overseas shipping was the only sensible option, given the increasingly restric

ROE of the past few months. On 6 June, following the sinking of Lusitania, U-bo

commanders were prohibited from attacking any large passenger ship, neutral or

enemy.30 A couple of months later the order was expanded to include all passenge

ers, regardless of size. Meanwhile, U-boat commanders had been put on notice th

order to avoid political complications with neutrals, they could only attack a ship 

it had been identified irrefutably as enemy.31 “In doubtful cases,” the order wrote

would be better to let an enemy merchantman pass through than to sink a neutra

When he announced the “halt” order to his staff, von Holtzendorff confessed tha

this mode of U-boat warfare “we don’t even scratch the skin of the whale.”33 On t

face of it, the results so far seemed to hold out little prospect of a quick British co

From January through September 1915, a total five hundred nonmilitary vessels, 

an aggregate tonnage of just over 800,000, had been sunk by the U-boats; about o

sixth had been sunk without warning.34 The two numbers put together suggest th

large percentage of sinkings involved small coastal vessels and fishing boats, who

losses had relatively little impact on Britain’s trade position. The ships that matte

were the oceangoing vessels of at least 1,600 tons.35 The historian Dwight Messim

suggests that about half of the U-boats’ sinkings during 1915 as a whole involved 

latter.36 Compared with Britain’s overall shipping inventory in 1915 of some twen

one million tons, even the entire 800,000-ton figure was far from life threatening

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set by enemy and neutral ships taken as prizes.37 In fact, according to one author, the

British booty of 743 merchantmen in 1914 and 1915 exceeded the number of ships

sunk so far in those years by the U-boats.38

The U-boats paid a heavy prize in return. Altogether nineteen boats fell victim to

enemy action in 1915; sixteen were lost in the waters around the British Isles.39 It could

be said that when the five boats lost in 1914 are added, Germany had effectively lost the

entire underwater fleet it had possessed at the start of the war. Of course, the construction of new submarines had not stood still. Fifty-two new boats were placed into service during 1915; by the end of the year forty-four boats were available for frontline

duty.40 On the British side, even though the year’s losses were tolerable—average

monthly losses in ships and tonnage had so far been kept to 1 percent or less—indications were that the numbers would likely rise and eventually have a serious impact on

the nation’s economic life in general and the war effort in particular. As the author of

History of the Great War: Seaborne Trade puts it, the “situation contained elements of

danger which only required time to become more clearly manifest.”41 For one, it was

now patently evident that the war would be a very prolonged affair, and it was far from

clear which side could outlast the other in a drawn-out economic struggle.42

More bad portents were certain trends in ship losses. One was that among the ships

that mattered—the oceangoing vessels of at least 1,600 tons—losses had averaged 5

percent.43 Next, monthly losses in the last two months of the U-boats’ first offensive

had seen a very sharp increase. Whereas the average monthly British loss during the

first seven months of 1915 had been 54,633 tons, August and September recorded

losses of 148,464 and 101,690 tons, respectively.44 What made these figures especially

problematic for the future was that they coincided with an alarming drop in new construction. According to one authority, 416,000 tons of new merchant shipping were stil

launched during the last quarter of 1914. The June and September quarters, however,

produced only 148,000 and 149,000 tons, respectively—that is, less than had been

sunk.45 Making this picture even worse was the escalating demand for shipping to support the war effort—this could only come at the expense of the national economy. At

the start of 1915, about 20 percent of British oceangoing tonnage had been requisitioned to support the British and allied military effort.46 By the end of October, the per

centage had grown to 25, which included 1,450 ships with an aggregate tonnage of

more than 5.5 million.47 Two months later, the allies called for another 1,428,000 tons,

which could only be had by reducing Britain’s own import needs.48 In sum, Churchill

and others were only partially right when they sought to interpret the U-boats’ retreat

from the narrow seas as their “first defeat.”49 Defeated the U-boats were indeed, but it

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the defender.

One more set of statistics deserves mention. They were cited by Churchill in his p

war reminiscences to back his claim that the U-boat campaign of 1915 had been

defeated. In April of that year, Churchill wrote, the U-boats sank twenty-three sh

only half of which were British. When this paltry number was juxtaposed with th

that during the same month British ports saw over six thousand arrivals and dep

tures, it was “patent to the whole world” that the Germans had failed miserably.50 

was only one problem with Churchill’s numbers, which would haunt British atte

to come to grips with the submarine until it was almost too late. They made for g

propaganda—uplifting morale at home and (it was hoped) deceiving the enemy 

his true accomplishments. The problem with Churchill’s statistics was that they c

pared apples and oranges. The six thousand or so arrivals and departures—most 

under 1,600 tons—included many vessels that made multiple port calls on a sin

voyage. This meant that numerous ships were double or even triple counted.

The monthly bulletins did not fool the Germans, who had their own, quite accur

sources of information, but they misled British planners. Initially, mixing numbe

port calls with numbers of individual vessels created a false sense of security abo

condition of the country’s shipping resources and, as a corollary, helped inflate th

mate of the efficiency of ASW measures. Later, the excessive estimate of the num

oceangoing vessels calling on British ports contributed to the belief that convoyin

impractical, that not enough escorts could be provided. It was only in 1917, wh

Britain reeled under the onslaught of unrestricted submarine warfare, that a cou

relatively junior naval officers pursued the “real” numbers and realized the scale 

self-deception.

The restricted U-boat war against shipping in British waters resumed in Februar

The commanders’ ROE during what became the short-lived “second offensive” d

little from those of the year before: enemy merchant vessels caught inside the wa

could be sunk without warning, neutrals according to the prize rules. Armed ene

merchant vessels were to be treated as auxiliary cruisers and sunk without warnin

regardless of their whereabouts in or outside the war zone. An exception was ma

passenger liners; armed or not, they were off limits.51 The rules were symptomati

the compromise that was reached between the naval leadership’s insistence on un

stricted warfare and the political leadership’s continuing worry over the attitude 

Britain’s most potent ASW weapon so far—the United States.

The overarching aim of the German campaign this time was to choke off Britain

nomic lifeline and force it to the peace table. Two considerations played a role, of 

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Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in January 1916 of what effectively

amounted to a total economic blockade of Germany set off a storm of public and military demands to “unshackle” the U-boats.52 Next, the current fleet buildup, which

added an average of six new boats each month, had opened a window of opportunity

to make a possibly decisive impact on British trade.53 The naval staff claimed that if the

U-boats could sink a monthly average of about 630,000 tons of shipping, they could

bring Britain to its knees in six to eight months.54 Bethmann-Hollweg was not

impressed. His calculations showed that Britain needed a monthly import of cereals of

only fifteen to sixteen thousand tons—an amount that called for only a handful of

ships. Furthermore, he wrote in a memorandum dated 29 February 1916, the navy

seemed to have ignored the possibility of increased enemy countermeasures, including

ironically, convoying.55 His cabinet colleague, finance minister Karl Helfferich, joined

in, pointing out that the navy’s claim that additional American financial aid would not

help Britain presumed that an “iron curtain” of U-boats could isolate the island from

the rest of the world. Even the navy itself, he said, counted on a slow and gradual

reduction of enemy tonnage.56 In the end, though, it was the fear of a final break with

the United States that forced the navy to settle for less than an all-out campaign.

British Countermeasures

As the author of U-Boot Alarm put it, the U-boats’ second offensive met with few

improvements in either the technical or tactical quality of British ASW measures. On

the weapons side, the first depth charges were issued to the fleet and the Auxiliary

Patrol in January 1916. They would not prove effective until more than a year later. Initial production runs were so small that the ships lucky enough to get any weapons at al

were provided only two. Even if more ordnance had been available, the lack of a reliabl

means of detection would have kept the “probability of kill” extremely low. As long as

“targeting” a U-boat depended mainly on where it had been last seen, any chance of

success for a craft carrying only a couple of depth charges required that it be almost lit

erally on top of the enemy when it was sighted—that is, within 140 feet of it.57 It took

the introduction of hydrophones and, more important, larger load-outs for saturation

attacks to make the depth charge eventually the single most productive U-boat “killer”

in World War I.

On the tactical side of the ASW ledger, British efforts in 1916 can best be characterized

as “more of the same.” The minefields in the Strait of Dover were strengthened, more

nets were added, additional decoy ships entered service, and more and more vessels of

various types joined the coastal auxiliary patrols. By the end of the year, nearly three

thousand vessels were patrolling U-boat-infested waters.58 The patrols were

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shipping. This was where the broad oceanic lanes became narrow funnels and wh

was thought the need to protect shipping was greatest and the presence of subma

most likely. There was nothing wrong with this reasoning, but the fact that the pr

was understood did not mean it could be solved.

The auxiliary patrols, which had originally been intended to alert naval forces to 

presence of U-boats, had by this time increasingly assumed an active “hunt and k

role. The problem was that without some kind of listening gear and more depth

charges, the probability of finding, let alone sinking, the enemy remained largely 

ter of accident and luck. Jellicoe blamed a shortage of ships to keep the U-boat d

and exhaust its batteries as the reason for the “invariable difficulty” of bringing a

encounter to successful conclusion.59 But this was hardly the crux of the matter, a

evident from one hunt-and-kill operation in September 1917. For seven days, tw

haps three, U-boats sank more than thirty merchantmen in an area off the south 

of England that was being watched over by forty-nine destroyers, forty-eight torp

boats, and 168 armed auxiliaries. During this time, the underwater enemy was ac

hunted by thirteen destroyers and seven Q-ships, which achieved no results.60

ASW productivity during the U-boats’ 1916 campaign had actually declined com

with the year before. During the four-month second offensive, hostile action acco

for the loss of only four U-boats in British waters—that is, roughly one boat per m

compared with an average of two during the 1915 campaign. This disappointing 

particularly stands out in light of two more facts. First, the ASW forces were ope

in an environment that was twice as “target rich” as the year before. A monthly a

of almost twelve U-boats operated around the British Isles during 1916, about tw

many as in 1915.61 Second, the number of ships involved in the ASW battle had r

nearly three thousand. All things being equal, therefore, the chances of an encoun

and, by inference, a kill should have been substantially greater, at least twice as hi

One reason why this was not the case is that the arming of merchant vessels had 

the U-boats far more cautious in approaching their intended victims. They used 

does more frequently; when they did not, the boats tended to stand off beyond g

range and use light signals or warning shots to force a surrender. If a ship answer

with gunfire, the U-boat, which was now likely to be armed with a mix of two 88

and 105-mm guns, could respond in kind and stand a fair chance of outshooting 

merchantman’s twelve-pounder or four-inch cannon. Alternatively, it could subm

which an experienced crew could now accomplish in about a minute.62 All in al

therefore, with the scheme of ASW methods then in existence, the British could

count on destroying eighteen to twenty U-boats a year, or between three and fo

every four months.63

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630,000 tons per month. Between March and May the boats accounted for 215 British

vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of almost 480,000.64 This number averaged out to

about the same monthly loss rate of the year before. Nonetheless, due to other pressures on shipping, losses had become more difficult for Britain to absorb. There was a

growing allied (including French, Italian, and Russian) demand for shipping; the supply needs of British forces on the western front had skyrocketed, and the output of

shipyards had declined, due in part to the Royal Navy’s needs for the repair and construction of its own vessels. The numbers are telling. During the first quarter of 1916,

325 British ships were lost from all causes; the yards produced ninety-three new vessels

Two hundred seventy-one vessels were lost in the second quarter; the yards completed

113.65 All in all, the overall quandary for British shipping in the spring of 1916 can be

summed up as this: how to meet the growing demand for war-related carrying capacity

with a merchant fleet that was steadily declining in numbers and tonnage. Since cutting

back on the flow of war matériel was not an option, the only apparent solution was a

drastic reduction in “nonessential” imports.

The “Sussex incident” and subsequent U.S. intervention permitted the British, however

briefly, to postpone the unpopular decision to impose import restrictions and their

corollary, rationing. On 24 March, the Flanders-based UB-29 sank the French crossChannel steamer Sussex. About fifty passengers and crew were lost, including an undetermined number of Americans. The U-boat attacked the ship with a torpedo, without

warning. The hapless German commander insisted he had mistaken the liner for a

minelayer, but the neutral nations, especially the United States, accused Germany of

deliberately and recklessly violating the ban on attacking unarmed passenger ships.

Ironically, the Germans had never publicized their own prohibition against attacking

liners, armed or not. President Wilson had accordingly good reason to believe that the

Sussex incident was proof of a Germany that fully intended to cast off all restrictions.

Confronted with the threat of an American diplomatic rupture, the Germans backed

down. On 24 April the boats were ordered to return to Prize Regulations. The next day,

the commander of the High Sea Fleet, Admiral Scheer, citing the danger of operating

under those restrictions, recalled its boats from British home waters. According to

Scheer, it was now “left to me until further notice to employ the U-boats in purely mili

tary enterprises.”66

When U-boat operations ceased, the New York daily Evening Mail exulted that henceforth “every ship that sails the seas is now as safe as if the submarine had never been

invented. Germany lays down the submarine arm.”67 In reality, only the operations by

the attack boats were halted, and then only in the waters around Britain. The smaller

minelaying boats continued their operations, and attacks in the Mediterranean

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Prize Regulations (more than 129,000 tons of shipping were sunk in August 1916

alone) were important in the resumption of the campaign in the fall of the year.

During the “pause,” the battle of Jutland (Skagerrak, for the Germans) was fough

Fourteen U-boats participated in what many navalists would later decry as Britai

one best (but lost) chance to defeat the U-boat threat once and for all. According 

this argument, if the Grand Fleet’s commander had only been true to the “Nelson

spirit” and pursued his enemy, he would almost certainly have sent the bulk of th

Sea Fleet to the bottom of the sea. In that event the U-boats and their “nests” in

the Heligoland Bight would no longer have been protected by the High Sea Fleet’

and would have been open to a deadly strike from the sea. As one Jutland critic p

“Had there been a decisive victory for us at Jutland, there certainly would not hav

been a submarine campaign of 1917, for the submarine campaign was based on t

German fleet.”69

The argument is speculative at best. A sober assessment reveals it as a highly imp

ble scenario. To begin with, it is not clear at all what a “decisive” British victory w

have entailed. At the end of the “real” Jutland, the Grand Fleet’s losses in matérie

personnel were about twice as large as the opponent’s.70 A decisive outcome for th

British could therefore have come only if Jellicoe’s battle fleet had substantially re

this exchange ratio. Even then, the British would have suffered their own losses, w

would have limited their ability to bring power to bear against the U-boat bases. 

shape such an operation might have taken is another question. One possibility w

have been a close blockade, another an amphibious assault, while a third option 

have been a more aggressive minelaying effort. Each would have been a very risky

undertaking, as it would have had to be carried out literally under German guns. 

island of Heligoland, which dominates the approach into the bight, was heavily

defended. Coastal artillery emplacements and the heavy guns of some of German

predreadnought battleships covered the coastline. British-laid and German mine

would have made it a slow and tedious task at best to penetrate within striking ra

the High Sea Fleet’s anchorages at Schilling, Wilhelmshaven, and Altenbruch. Las

certainly not least, the attacker would have had to contend with the guerilla tacti

torpedo boats and U-boats. With respect to the latter, it is important to keep in m

that it was the U-boats, or rather the fear of U-boats, that prompted Jellicoe’s dec

to break off the pursuit at Jutland. In sum, Jellicoe was almost certainly right wh

shortly after assuming the post of First Sea Lord, he dismissed calls for a from-th

assault against the U-boats as “playing the German game, with the possible resul

our losing the command of the sea and the consequent loss of the war.”71

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clear to Scheer at least that even the most favorable outcome of a decisive battle would

not compel the British to sue for peace.72 It followed, Scheer wrote, that if “we are not

finally to be bled to death, full use must be made of the U-boats as a means of war, so

as to grip England’s vital nerve.”73 Scheer and the navy’s leadership asked for the maximum flexibility. The commander of the Flanders flotilla urged that his boats be used to

“seal off ” the English Channel and sink all shipping there without warning. When this

was rejected on political grounds, he grudgingly agreed to fight “this kind of U-boat

war,” according to the Prize Regulations. It was better than nothing, and he would look

upon it as a preparation (Vorarbeit) for unrestricted war.74

The third (restricted) U-boat offensive lasted from October 1916 to January 1917.

During the last quarter of 1916, monthly sinkings exceeded 300,000 tons, for a total of

963,863 tons and 554 ships. This figure was close to the tonnage sunk during the entire

preceding year (1,189,031 tons).75 Several developments made these favorable returns

possible. One hundred eight boats were added to the fleet in 1916—nearly five times

as many as the number of boats lost (twenty-three). Next, larger boats, U-boat “cruisers,” permitted more distant operations, beyond the reach of the coastal auxiliary

patrols. Boats were now found in the Gulf of Biscay, from France’s Atlantic coast down

to Portugal; in the Arctic Sea; and even, on one occasion, off the east coast of the

United States.

The rapidly escalating shipping losses in the winter of 1916–17 brought home to Britain’s political-military leadership for the first time the fact that it faced a national crisis

that could make or break the war effort. Monthly losses were now double those of

1915; shipping under allied flag was being destroyed at a rate of over sixty thousand

tons per month, more than three times as fast as the year before. Neutral shipping in

particular was being hit hard. In 1915, the neutrals had lost an average of 17,500 tons

each month; during the quarter ending in December 1916, no less than 100,000 tons a

month disappeared. The situation had, in the words of one author, become “truly

alarming.”76 The country’s supply of wheat was down to fourteen weeks.77 Worse, the

Admiralty had effectively come to the conclusion that it had no answer to the problem

On 20 November it circulated a memorandum that essentially called on the army to

solve the problem: “It can definitely be stated that naval resources are practically

exhausted as far as small craft for hunting submarines are concerned. . . . It is therefore

suggested . . . that the question be considered whether it is not worth while shaping

military strategy as far as can now be done to assist in the reduction of the submarine

menace through the destruction of as many of their home bases as is practicable.”78

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Somme offensive, the disappointing outcome of Jutland, and now the U-boat cri

all contributed to the fall of the Asquith cabinet in December. One of the first de

of the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, was to institute an inner “War 

net,” which would, he hoped, streamline the country’s unwieldy political-milita

decision-making process. Placing himself at the War Cabinet’s head, Lloyd Georg

appointed Maurice (later Lord) Hankey as its secretary. At its first meeting on

9 December a shipping controller was appointed to give central direction to wha

heretofore been the work of a mostly ad hoc collection of agencies that had spru

to deal with the emergency of the day.79 Changes were made at the Admiralty as w

Jellicoe was relieved of command of the Grand Fleet and made First Sea Lord. Jel

fully agreed with Lloyd George that defeating the U-boats was the number-one

priority. As a first step, he brought in one of his Grand Fleet subordinate com

manders, Rear Admiral Alexander Ludovic Duff, to head up a new Anti-Subm

Division. The new organization was to coordinate and stimulate all means of d

ing the U-boat danger, but Jellicoe’s memoirs make patently clear his very trad

and limited understanding of what exactly “defeating the U-boats” meant. “Ou

object,” he wrote, “was to destroy submarines at a greater rate than the output of 

German shipyards. This was the surest way of counteracting their activities. It wa

mainly for the purpose of attack on the submarines that I formed the Anti-Subm

Division of the Naval Staff.”80

As has been related in the Royal Navy’s official history of the war at sea, shortly a

Duff ’s arrival the Admiralty compiled an “exhaustive survey” of the existing inve

of ASW means and methods. First, “items in the general plan of attacking U-boa

wherever they could be found” were reviewed: mines and depth charges, “hunter

submarines, special hydrophone-equipped “hunting patrols,” and so forth. Cons

separately were ways to give better protection to shipping: more gun-armed merc

men, more net barrages across the Strait of Dover, and finally, convoys.81 As the w

official naval historian put it blandly, “Their [i.e., convoys’] position on the list w

suffice to show that they were not regarded as of particular importance.”82

Jellicoe certainly held to this point of view at the time. On 2 November, while stil

mander in chief of the Grand Fleet and shortly before the fall of the Asquith gov

ment, he met with the War Committee, including Lloyd George. According to Ha

the meeting broached for the first time the subject of convoys.83 Jellicoe strongly 

the Admiralty’s official position that convoying was neither desirable nor feasible

According to one of his admiring biographers, Admiral Reginald Bacon, “Sir Joh

studied “the question thoroughly from the Admiralty point of view.”85 His conclu

presumably shared the Admiralty’s pessimistic appraisal at the time, that little or

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therefore “we must for the present be content with palliation.”86

In his book The Submarine Peril, Jellicoe would later highlight the various improvements that were made in the area of offensive ASW countermeasures during his early

months as head of the Admiralty. He seems to have particularly taken seriously the

deterrent effect of arming merchantmen with guns. According to his own account, of

310 defensively armed ships attacked between 1 January 1916 and 25 January 1917, 236

escaped, sixty-two were sunk by torpedoes, and only twelve were sunk by gunfire. By

contrast, only sixty-seven out of 302 unarmed ships escaped. Two hundred five of the

victims were sunk by gunfire “or bombs.”87

Unfortunately, these statistics are somewhat misleading in that the sinkings of armed

vessels appear to have been concentrated at the end of the year. Naval Operations

reports that the number of armed vessels sunk was in fact quite small until August 191

but that twelve armed merchant ships were sunk in December and another twenty the

next month.88 These numbers are significant and take on a very different meaning than

suggested by Jellicoe when it is realized that the total number of British vessels sunk by

submarines in December and January was thirty-six each.89 In other words, 33 percent

of ships (twelve out of thirty-six) sunk in December were armed, and a whopping 56

percent (twenty out of thirty-six) in January. Evidently, whatever deterrent value arming merchant vessels might have had before had been largely neutralized by the Uboats’ more circumspect approach tactics and more powerful gun armament. In any

case, whatever residual deterrent value was left would be rendered null and void once

the U-boats’ restrictive ROE were lifted and the boats were free to attack without warn

ing. Even while war was still being fought according to the Prize Regulations, the

steadily escalating toll that was being exacted portended worse to come. In the words o

one German historian, the threat of an unrestricted onslaught hung over the British

Isles like the “sword of Damocles.”90

“The Most Tremendous Undertaking”

The decision to cut the thin thread that held the sword was made on 9 January 1917 at

a crown council held at the emperor’s residence in Pless, Silesia. The date of 1 February

was set as the date for opening the campaign. All shipping, enemy and neutral, including passenger ships, would be liable to attack without warning. The principal war zone

included the waters encompassing the British Isles, including the Channel; the western

half of the North Sea; and the waters extending four hundred nautical miles from the

west coast of France. Also declared a war zone was the entire Mediterranean Sea, with

the exceptions of Spanish coastal waters and a lane, twenty nautical miles wide, set

aside for Greek steamers. In March, the Barents Sea was added to the list. Further

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and, eventually, most of the North Atlantic, were declared in November 1917 and 

ary 1918.91 Over a hundred U-boats stood poised to launch what Scheer labeled “

most tremendous undertaking that the world-war brought in its long train.”92

The aim was no less than to compel Britain to sue for peace within five to six mo

The Germans had done their homework. A team of civilian economic, financial, 

maritime experts commissioned by the naval staff had calculated that if the U-bo

could sink 600,000 tons of shipping each month, and if 40 percent of neutral shi

could be frightened into staying in port, five months would suffice to reduce the

amount of shipping for Britain’s supply needs by 39 percent. This, the group pred

would be an “unacceptable loss.”93 As matters turned out, the basic statistics were

sound. Accurate also was the calculation that the United States would likely join 

many’s enemies but that it would take eighteen months for its vast resources to b

mobilized, presumably far too late to rescue the British.94 The fatal flaw in the cal

tions concerned certain underlying premises and assumptions—for example, the 

that the British “political system” was incapable of imposing onerous food ration

The naval leadership too had its assumptions. Von Holtzendorff was convinced t

his U-boats could dispatch 300,000 to 400,000 tons of shipping to the bottom ea

month despite the Prize Regulations, it should manage 600,000 tons without tho

restrictions. The basis of the navy’s chief of staff ’s confidence was the belief that

increased U-boat losses due to improved enemy countermeasures would be more 

offset by new additions to the order of battle. Implicit in this estimate was the ass

tion that enemy defensive improvements would be slow and evolutionary—more 

more mines, etc. No thought seems to have been given to the possibility of a Brit

“breakthrough” solution that might somehow defeat the 600,000-tons-per-mont

The German navy’s propaganda had painted the U-boat as an unbeatable “wond

weapon”; a British countermiracle within the next six months was unimaginable

Von Holtzendorff ’s expectations seemed well-founded in the first few months of 

unrestricted campaign. In February, worldwide shipping losses climbed to about

500,000 tons, in March to some 540,000 tons, and in April, the allies’ worst, over

840,000 tons disappeared.96 This averaged to just about the 600,000 tons per mon

German navy had calculated would be necessary to bring Britain to its knees. Th

that up to 40 percent of neutral shipping would be deterred from continuing to t

with Britain seemed to be borne out as well. In January 1917, the number of port

entrances and clearances by neutral vessels over one thousand tons had still been 

and 832, respectively. The numbers of entrances and clearances in February and 

combined fell to 299 and 660, respectively.97 Since the output of British shipyards 

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impose further import restrictions. In February cuts amounting to 500,000 tons a

month in commodities ranging from luxury items, such as coffee and silk clothing, to

basic foodstuffs and raw factory materials were announced.98 The supply of basic foodstuffs at this time was estimated to be enough to last six weeks at best.99

Notes

1. Sir Julian S. Corbett, Naval Operations (London: Longmans, Green, 1921), vol. 2, p. 133.

2. Ibid., p. 18.

3. Robert M. Grant, U-boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare 1914–1918

(London: Putnam, 1964), p. 20. This number

does not include U-boats sunk by decoy

trawlers.

4. Günter Krause, U-Boot Alarm: Zur

Geschichte der U-Boot-Abwehr (1914–1945)

(Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagshaus,

1998), p. 34.

5. Adm. Sir Reginald Bacon, The Dover Patrol

1915–1917 (London: Hutchinson, 1919), vol.

2, p. 391.

6. Arno Spindler, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918:

Der Handelskrieg mit U-booten, vol. 2,

Februar bis September 1915 (Berlin: E. S.

Mittler and Son, 1933; trans. Naval War College as The War at Sea, 1914–1918: The Submarine War on Commerce [Newport, R.I.:

Department of Intelligence and Research,

1934]), p. 31. Even though the nets themselves were not emplaced until much later,

merchant vessels and the Germans were led

to believe otherwise by a system of warning

buoys and lightships. According to Spindler,

“They hinted at something that did not exist

. . . and the British blockade profited

thereby.”

7. On the poor performance of British mines,

see Bacon, Dover Patrol 1915–1917, vol. 1,

pp. 69–70; Capt. J. S. Cowie, Mines, Minelayers and Minelaying (London: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1949), pp. 47–44; and Krause, U-Boot

Alarm, p. 34.

8. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 34.

9. See Bacon, Dover Patrol 1915–1917, vol. 1,

pp. 24–41.

10. Corbett, Naval Operations, vol. 2, p. 283.

11. Spindler reported the U-boats’ rerouting via

the northern passage doubled the distance

they had to travel to their patrol grounds,

from 700 to 1,400 miles for a round trip of

fourteen days. This left only four days for

the U-boat to operate on its assigned patrol

station, which no longer included the water

off London. See Spindler, War at Sea, 1914–

1918, p. 8. Also, Joachim Schröder, Die UBoote des Kaisers (Bonn: Bernard and Graefe

Verlag, 2003), p. 120.

12. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 52.

13. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 475.

The instructions also urged that if the vessel

flew a neutral flag it be replaced with the

British colors before opening fire.

14. Memorandum of the Imperial German Gov

ernment on the Treatment of Armed Merchantmen, 10 February 1916, available at

www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1916/merchant

.html.

15. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 166.

16. Paul Kemp, U-boats Destroyed: German Submarine Losses in the World Wars (Annapolis,

Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1997), pp. 9–59.

17. Naval-History.net 1997–2010, www.naval

-history.net/WW1NavyBritishQships.htm.

18. Kemp, U-boats Destroyed, p. 13.

19. H. G. Wells wrote in the 11 June issue of the

Times that this war was essentially a “struggle of invention.” He called for much greater

efforts at enlisting the country’s scientific

talent. Cited in Willem Hackmann, Seek &

Strike: Sonar, Anti-submarine Warfare and

the Royal Navy 1914–54 (London: H.M. Stationery Off., 1984), p. 13.

20. In 1915, the keels for at least seventy-six

U-boats of different types were laid. See

Eberhard Rössler, Die Unterseeboote der

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Graefe Verlag, 1997), pp. 70–140.

21. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1430, Report of the Board, 1917.

22. Fisher was effectively forced into early retirement in the wake of his increasingly vitriolic

disagreement with Winston Churchill—the

Admiralty’s First Lord and therefore political

head—over the conduct of the Dardenelles

campaign. See Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval

Institute Press, 1994), p. 117.

23. The BIR’s six sections were Section I, Airships and General Aeronautics; Section II,

Submarines and Wireless Telegraphy; Section III, Naval Construction; Section IV, Antiaircraft Equipment; Section V, Ordnance

and Ammunition; Section VI, Armament of

Aircraft, Bombs, and Bombsights.

Hackmann, Seek & Strike, p. 18.

24. Ibid. The board was formally abolished in

September 1917 and its work moved to the

Admiralty’s newly established Central Research Establishment. See also ibid., pp. 28–

37.

25. Ibid., p. 19.

26. Ibid., pp. 21–26, 45–55.

27. For an account of the Holland investigation

and its politics, see ibid., pp. 32–37.

28. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM116/1430,

Report on the Present Organisation of the

Board of Invention and Research.

29. It is no accident that World War I coincided

with the end of the “great age of amateurs,”

in which a serving naval officer could “doodle a design” and see it transformed into a

real technical invention. See Hubert C. Johnson, “Anglo-American Naval Inventors,

1890–1919: Last of a Breed,” International

Journal of Naval History 1, no. 1 (April

2002).

30. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 143.

31. Ibid., p. 177.

32. Hermann Bauer, Als Führer der U-Boote im

Weltkriege: Der Eintritt der U-Boot Waffe in

die Seekriegsführung (Leipzig: Koehler and

Amelang, 1941), p. 315. Bauer was the Uboats’ commander in chief until June 1917.

33. Cited in Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p.

179. His complete remark was, “Glauben Sie

mir, meine Herren, mit Ihrem Ubootskrieg

ritzen Sie dem Walfisch nicht die Haut.”

ping was lost to other forms of enem

tion, mainly mines.

35. The British defined “oceangoing ship

steam vessels of at least 1,600 gross r

tered tonnage.

36. Dwight R. Messimer, Find and Destro

submarine Warfare in World War I

(Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Pre

2001), p. 70.

37. Fayle’s official British account of the 

against trade reports that thanks to t

ture of enemy ships, the total tonnag

able in the fall of 1915 was actually g

than at the outbreak of war. C. Ernes

History of the Great War: Seaborne Tr

(New York: Longmans, Green, 1923)

p. 167.

38. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 53.

39. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 

40. Ibid., pp. 427–28.

41. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 2

42. Ibid. (See Fayle’s comment.)

43. Ibid., p. 128.

44. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 3

p. 465. Not surprisingly monthly wo

losses showed a similar rise, from an 

of 86,504 tons between January and 

185,866 and 151,884 tons in August 

September, respectively.

45. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 2

46. Ibid., p. 169.

47. Ibid., p. 177.

48. Ibid., p. 231.

49. Winston S. Churchill, The World Cris

1918 (London: Odhams, 1923–27), v

719. Churchill repeated the numbers 

by Corbett in Naval Operations, vol. 

284–85.

50. Churchill, World Crisis 1911–1918, p

32.

51. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 

52. Grey said, “What we want to do is to 

goods reaching or coming from the e

country, and that is what we are doin

“No ships are going through to Germ

ports at all.” Ibid., p. 189.

53. Ibid., p. 428.

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U-Boote im Weltkriege, p. 347.

55. Schröder, p. 198.

56. Ibid.

57. The Type D depth-charge design and its variants had a TNT charge of up to three hundred pounds. It was preset to explode at

either forty or eighty feet and, according to

British figures, would destroy a submarine at

a range of seventy feet and cause severe

damage out to 140 feet. Messimer, Find and

Destroy, pp. 77–78.

58. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 57.

59. Admiral Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa, The

Grand Fleet 1914–16: Its Creation, Development and Work (London: Cassell, 1919), p.

227.

60. Henry Newbolt, Naval Operations (London:

Longmans, Green, 1928), vol. 4, pp. 333–37.

61. Andreas Michelsen, Der U-Bootskrieg 1914–

1918 (Leipzig: Hafe and Koehler Verlag,

1942), p. 182. Vice Admiral Michelsen commanded the High Sea Fleet’s submarines

from June 1917 till the end of the war.

62. Ibid., p. 209.

63. This calculation was made by Newbolt in

Naval Operations, vol. 4, p. 51.

64. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 430.

65. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 3, p. 467.

66. Admiral Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in

the World War (London: Cassell, 1920),

p. 130.

67. Cited in Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p.

219.

68. The Germans correctly guessed that since

few American citizens traveled in the Mediterranean, they could safely continue operations there.

69. Maj. A. C. B. Alexander, Jutland: A Plea for a

General Naval Staff (London: Hugh Rees,

1923), p. 51. See also John Buchan, A History

of the Great War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1922), vol. 3, p. 316. Scheer’s claim that the

High Sea Fleet’s guns were critical to the

U-boat campaign gives indirect support to

the argument, but one suspects that he

sought to deflect criticism of “his” High Sea

Fleet’s relative inactivity during the war.

70. The British lost three battle cruisers and

three armored cruisers, as well as eight

sualties, including dead and wounded, were

6,768. The Germans lost one predreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, and

five destroyers; their casualties were 3,058.

Halpern, Naval History of World War I,

p. 326.

71. Admiral of the Fleet, the Rt. Hon. Earl

Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril: Admiralty Policy in 1917 (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 24.

72. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 54.

73. Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the

World War, p. 177.

74. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, pp. 237–

38.

75. Ibid., p. 430.

76. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 2, pp.

380–81.

77. Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–

1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin,

1961), vol. 2, p. 643.

78. Cited in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Se

crets, vol. 1, 1877–1918 (Annapolis, Md.: Na

val Institute Press, 1970), p. 315.

79. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 2, p. 378

80. Jellicoe, Submarine Peril, p. 35.

81. Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. 4, pp.

325–32.

82. Ibid., p. 332.

83. Hankey, Supreme Command 1914–1918, p.

553.

84. Peter Rowland, David Lloyd George: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp.

393–94.

85. Admiral Sir R. H. Bacon, The Life of John

Rushworth Earl Jellicoe (London: Cassell,

1936), p. 352.

86. Ibid., p. 351.

87. Jellicoe, Submarine Peril, p. 15. His biographer, Bacon, provides the identical figures.

Bacon, Life of John Rushworth Earl Jellicoe,

p. 353.

88. Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. 4, p. 331.

89. British Vessels Lost at Sea 1914–18, Section II

Merchant Shipping (Losses) (Cambridge,

U.K.: Patrick Stevens, 1977), pp. 27–31.

90. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 251.

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“Amerikanische Sperrgebiet.” Maps included

in Michelsen, Der U-Bootskrieg 1914–1918.

92. Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World

War, p. 254.

93. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 298.

94. Holger H. Herwig, The Politics of Frustration:

The United States in Naval Planning, 1889–

1941 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 117–

21, 126–28.

95. For a critical review of the thinking underlying Germany’s decision to declare unrestricted U-boat war, see Holger H. Herwig,

“Total Rhetoric, Limited War: Germany’s

Military and Strategic Studies (Spring 

available at www.jmss.org/.

96. Sources differ slightly over the tonna

shipping sunk. For example, Fayle, H

the Great War, vol. 3, p. 465, reports 

540,006, 593,841, and 881,027 tons i

ruary, March, and April, respectively

Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 

cites 499,430, 548,817, and 841,118 t

respectively.

97. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 3

98. Ibid., p. 63.

99. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 59.

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“The Old Theories Have Been Tried and Fou

Wanting”

The huge British defensive effort so far was clearly a shambles.1Writing in his dia

8 February, Hankey admitted that it looked like “our military effort would so far

exhaust us that we cannot maintain our sea power and our economic position.” H

consoled himself that his country seemed at least to be sinking “a good many sub

rines.”2

He was wrong. In February, the Germans lost five U-boats, four of which 

enemy action. In March and April another four boats fell victim to mines and ot

hostile causes.3In other words, 1,104 ships were sunk at the cost of nine attacker

Henry Newbolt quite rightly labeled the U-boats’ “power to force unwieldy and d

portionate concentrations of ships” as “most extraordinary.”4

In his chronicle of 

war at sea, he summarized the vast arsenal of ASW forces deployed in February 1

In February 1917 about two-thirds of our destroyer strength, and all our submarines, mineswe

and auxiliaries, were engaged in some branch of submarine warfare. . . . In Home waters and t

Mediterranean about three thousand destroyer and auxiliary patrol vessels were engaged in co

ing the submarine menace, either directly or indirectly; so that every German submarine was d

some twenty-seven craft and their crews from other duties by pinning them to patrol areas an

ing them to spend their time in screening, searching and hunting operations which very rarely 

in success.5

The Royal Navy’s mainstay strategic scheme for giving inbound and outbound sh

ping at least a modicum of protection was rapidly unraveling. Involved here was 

called approach-areas strategy. This protective system had been introduced off th

south coast of Ireland in the summer of 1915 but had gradually expanded to thre

“great cones of approach” in which oceanic shipping converged on Britain’s large

ports. The scheme called for inbound shipping to be routed along very thinly pat

approach routes until it arrived in home waters and could benefit from the more

heavily patrolled inshore routes. Outbound shipping followed the reverse proced

The system worked reasonably well while the U-boats operated near shore; it fell 

when the larger boats sought their prey some two hundred nautical miles farther 

where patrol coverage was weak or nonexistent as the approach routes converged

CHAPTER THREE

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sand square miles quickly became death traps from which twenty-five out of every

hundred steamers that left Britain in the spring of 1917 failed to return.7

As the minister

of shipping wrote after the war, they had become the “graveyard of British shipping.”8

Even the Admiralty was compelled to admit at the end of March that despite all efforts

the attack had outstripped the defense, with no solution in sight.9The implication was

obvious: “The end of the war could be fixed with arithmetical precision at no very distant date.”10

One of Winston Churchill’s most memorable phrases of World War II pays tribute to

the young men who won the Battle of Britain and thereby arguably saved the country

from German invasion. “Never in the field of human conflict,” the prime minister

declared on 20 August 1940, “was so much owed by so many to so few.” With only a

slight exaggeration, the same might be said of two relatively junior Royal Navy officers

who in World War I “bucked the system” to catalyze the “counterrevolution in military

affairs” that halted the slide to seemingly inevitable defeat. Their names have become

footnotes at best in most histories of the U-boat campaign, but had it not been for

their willingness to question, at considerable risk to their careers, the prevailing

assumptions and “facts” about the conduct of the anti-U-boat war, the “final solution”

to the U-boat problem—that is, the convoy system—might never have been adopted.

The two were Commander (later Admiral Sir) Reginald Henderson and Captain (later

Vice Admiral) Kenneth G. B. DeWar. Both worked in the Admiralty, Henderson in the

Anti-Submarine Division and DeWar in the Operations Division. It is not clear from

the evidence which of the two took the initiative, the problem being in part that their

accounts of their respective experiences are curiously similar. In any event, between the

two it was discovered, first, that the attrition to British shipping was far greater than

the public statistics suggested and, second, that the actual number of oceangoing ships

arriving at and sailing from British ports was much smaller than was advertised, making the provision of convoy escorts a much more manageable undertaking than had

been claimed by the Admiralty.

The Henderson version of events is the one more often cited. Bits and pieces appear in

Lloyd George’s and Hankey’s memoirs, as well as in the official histories of the war at

sea. DeWar’s version is found in his own memoirs, The Navy from Within.11 In any

event, both officers, finding that the Admiralty itself could not provide reliable statistics about the comings and goings of overseas shipping, reportedly turned to the newly

created Ministry of Shipping. Henderson supposedly did so in connection with his

responsibility for organizing the “controlled” sailings of the cross-Channel coal trade

to France. Practically speaking, these were convoys, but the Admiralty was evidently no

quite ready to use that name. For his part, DeWar would write that he needed better

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ing to his account, the Admiralty’s Trade Division could tell him only the numbe

tonnage of ships sunk; customs returns gave him a tabulation of weekly arrivals a

sailings.

With the help of Norman Leslie of the Ministry of Shipping, it did not take long 

realize that the customs numbers grossly exaggerated the actual number of vesse

called on British ports. “These figures,” DeWar wrote later, “had been started as p

ganda for the public.”12 For example, the report of 1,800 cross-Channel passages 

month involved only about two hundred vessels. DeWar’s next Weekly Appreciat

which reported that arrivals and departures of oceangoing ships that week had

amounted to only two hundred, was met with two reactions. First, there was disb

the First Lord had become so accustomed to hearing the inflated customs return

he thought DeWar must be using daily figures. The second response was bureauc

DeWar, according to his own account, had transgressed the rules of the Admiralt

contacting another ministerial department without proper clearance to do so. In 

temporary military terminology, he had failed to “staff ” his initiative properly. P

ment came swiftly. Jellicoe ordered his immediate reassignment to a derelict crui

lying in Colombo harbor, Ceylon. Thanks to his wife’s political connections, DeW

succeeded in blocking this.13

The story of Henderson’s role is very similar. Henderson, according to Lloyd Geo

autobiography, discovered the “fateful error in accountantship which nearly lost 

War.” It was an error, he wrote, that would not have been made by “an ordinary c

a shipping office” (a reference to Lloyd’s Register) and that could have been avoid

with common sense and a “sum in simple addition.” Unfortunately, wrote the pr

minister, no one on the Board of Admiralty in the spring of 1917 had “possessed 

triple qualification.”14 Henderson belonged to the “convoy lobby” of young office

within the Admiralty; the revealing statistics were, in a sense, his last, best chance 

undermine the institution’s persistent refusal to consider the convoys as either de

or feasible. As already hinted in DeWar’s account, the Admiralty itself was not lik

welcome Henderson’s numbers, especially their implication that convoying migh

practical proposition after all: the “real” numbers impugned the “High Admirals

common sense, and if the statistics strengthened the case for convoying, their str

wisdom was in question as well.15 Knowing this, Henderson circumvented the na

formal chain of command and contacted the political leadership directly. The ind

tions are that he chose Hankey, Lloyd George’s éminence grise, as his point of con

Hankey himself does not mention any such meeting in his autobiography, but hi

rapher, Stephen Roskill, believed this to be almost certainly the case.16 There is a p

bility also that, perhaps at Hankey’s instigation, Henderson went to see Lloyd Ge

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versation but makes clear that he met with a number of junior officers who were critical of their superiors’ ASW schemes and refusal to consider the convoy option

seriously.17 Jellicoe and his biographer, Admiral Bacon, also mention Lloyd George’s

penchant for seeking out the opinions of junior officers. Not surprisingly, neither

Jellicoe nor Bacon was pleased. “There were apparently certain junior officers who

went to, and were received by, Mr. Lloyd George, and who formulated to him ideas for

dealing with the submarine menace,” Jellicoe wrote. “Personally,” he went on, “I had

never heard of their proposals,” and in any case, it was “strange that they did not ask to

see me nor some other officer in authority.”18 Bacon too was dismissive of “some junior

officers and laymen” who, in his words, “egged on” the prime minister to force the

immediate adoption of the convoy. Fortunately, Bacon reported, Jellicoe “withstood

Mr. Lloyd George’s visionary ideas until America entered the war.”19

The admirals’ unhappiness is understandable. These junior officers had clearly violated

the chain of command; their advocacy outside the Admiralty Board Room of a strategy

that was clearly at odds with the agreed strategy smacked of insubordination, if not

outright sabotage. The officers’ most grievous sin, though, was that by confiding in the

country’s political leadership they had breached the navy’s long and jealously guarded

immunity from civilian interference.20 In the past, both sides had always understood

that decisions on how and where to fight belonged to the professional senior officers;

the latter had always made it clear that without a free hand they could not be responsible for the conduct of war. In March 1917, at the height of the convoy debate, the

navy’s long-treasured independence received one of its last hurrahs from the First Lord

Sir Edward Carson. “I advise the country,” he declared in a luncheon speech, “to pay no

attention to amateur strategists, who are always impatient and always ready for a gamble. We cannot afford to gamble with our fleet. As long as I am at the Admiralty the

sailors will have full scope. They will not be interfered with by me and I will not let

anyone interfere with them.”21

Lloyd George himself had honored this tradition during his first few months in office.

He had approved the Admiralty’s now familiar but largely ineffective countermeasure

programs, for two reasons. First, like most of the British public, he underestimated the

severity of Britain’s condition.22 Second, being new in office, he was not ready to dispute the professional judgment of “the most famous specialists . . . in the United Kingdom.”23 Consequently, though perhaps not wisely, he allegedly resolved that Jellicoe wa

to “be given a fair trial.”24

The Henderson/DeWar numbers ended Jellicoe’s “honeymoon” with Lloyd George; the

Admiralty’s monopoly on decision making was finis. The end began on 13 February,

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10 Downing Street. Hankey also attended. On the agenda was a memorandum pr

pared by Hankey advocating the adoption of convoying at the earliest possible da

Hankey has described his proposal as the result of “a brainwave on the subject of 

submarine warfare” he had had a few days earlier.26 His biographer speculates as 

whether this “brainwave” was perhaps triggered by a meeting with Henderson.27 

navy’s leadership were not yet ready to be convinced, however. Only a month bef

Jellicoe had told the War Cabinet that he wanted more decoy ships, as these were 

most effective method of dealing with submarines.”28 As for convoys, the admirals 

Lloyd George that merchant ships could not sail in formation, that not enough des

were available for escorts, that a convoy would have to sail at the speed of the slowe

sel, and that a group of ships presented a much bigger and more vulnerable target 

vessel traveling alone. The admirals did agree, however, to monitor carefully the res

ongoing trial convoys to France and Norway.29 Although he had achieved much le

he wanted, Lloyd George was not quite ready yet to bring matters to a head.

Jellicoe, on his part, does not seem to have looked upon the French and Norwegi

convoy “experiments” with particularly objective detachment. When at a meeting 

the War Cabinet on 23 April Lloyd George again raised the possibility of adoptin

convoy system, Jellicoe agreed “to make a further report on the matter” but remi

the prime minister that “the trial” of the Norwegian convoy “had not been altoge

successful, two vessels in separate convoys already having been torpedoed and su

The First Sea Lord evidently continued to place much more stock in “traditional

weapons (now including American ones)—more destroyers, more patrol vessels, 

more aircraft—to patrol danger areas and hunt down U-boats. “Quite obviously

wrote Newbolt, “the First Sea Lord did not then contemplate any fundamental al

ation in our entire system of defence.”31

In his study of the influence of perceptions on policy making, Robert Jervis has n

how people who favor a particular policy usually believe that it is supported by m

logically independent reasons. What is interesting about this phenomenon is tha

a strictly rational perspective, there is no need to marshal multiple reasons for on

preference—each by itself would suffice. The same holds for people who oppose a 

ticular policy. According to Jervis, this tendency toward “overkill” in belief system

marked the Admiralty’s resistance against the introduction of convoying.32

The reasons given why convoying was neither feasible nor desirable can be summ

as follows. To begin with, it was feared that ships sailing closely together, emittin

massive combined plume of smoke, would be more, not less, likely spotted by a p

ing U-boat than would ships steaming singly. It was easy to visualize what would

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would panic, lose formation, and collide in their haste to flee the killing ground. In any

case, many naval and merchant marine officers doubted whether a group of ships could

sail a tightly controlled zigzag course even when not under attack; more ships might be

lost as the result of collisions than of actions of the enemy. In his memoirs Jellicoe

acknowledges that this concern turned out “somewhat exaggerated” but asserts that it

was based at the time on his consultations with “many” merchant shipmasters.33 Jellicoe

may have had any number of informal conversations of this kind, but the record reports

only one official discussion. It took place on 23 February 1917. Ten masters were

invited, nine attended. Jellicoe found that all nine much preferred to sail alone rather

than in company. They “were quite emphatic” in their opinion, he wrote, that it would

be impossible for eight ships, sailing in two columns and at speeds differing by, say, two

knots, to keep station two and a half cables (about five hundred yards) apart.34

Jellicoe’s suggested station-keeping criteria are interesting. They were evidently not

based on any “field test” but borrowed from the Grand Fleet. When in cruising formation, the Grand Fleet’s battleships were typically organized into four-ship divisions,

which, like Jellicoe’s suggested convoy, steamed in columns, each ship two and a half

cables from the ship ahead and the columns themselves eight cables, or 1,600 yards,

apart.35 Keeping exact station could be difficult even for practiced navy crews. In the

event of difficulties (arising from weather or high speed, for example) standing instruc

tions called for ships to increase the distance between them.36 With this background in

mind, the shipmasters’ negative reaction to Jellicoe’s rather stringent convoy requirements is not surprising. Perhaps more surprising is that Jellicoe apparently did not take

a leaf from the Admiralty’s own instructions and ask whether station keeping would be

feasible if spacing between ships was greater—perhaps doubled to five cables. Moreover, a skeptic could have pointed out that the key reason for the close spacing of warships was not relevant to merchant vessels. Tight station keeping was necessary to

minimize the time the battle fleet needed to make the transition from cruising to battle

formation; there was no such need for a merchant convoy. But then perhaps Jellicoe

was not looking for an answer that might “prove” the convoy.37 Interestingly, when the

convoy system was instituted, the typical spacing between ships in column was one

thousand yards, and that between columns as much as two thousand yards.38

The Admiralty’s excessive (as it turned out) estimate of the number of escorts needed

to protect a convoy may also have had its roots in Grand Fleet practice. Admiralty

opinion at the time had it that escorting forces would have to be twice as numerous as

the vessels being escorted.39 As in the case of the station-keeping issue, this was evidently an a priori opinion, resting on neither practical experience with convoy screening nor any form of careful analysis. Instead, the two-to-one relationship in the Grand

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screened capital ships seems to have been used as the benchmark.40

If the Grand Fleet model for escort requirements indeed formed the basis for the

Admiralty’s estimate of how many ships would be needed to protect convoys, the 

sequences were unfortunate. “Not enough destroyers” was constantly cited as a k

son why convoying, however desirable it might be on other grounds (which it wa

in the eyes of most admirals), was infeasible.41 No one evidently considered that a 

fleet’s destroyer screen served an entirely different purpose from a convoy’s—the 

was there to attack the enemy’s battleships with torpedoes and defend its own ba

ships against enemy torpedo destroyers; the second was designed simply to prote

When the convoys set sail in 1917, the continued shortage of escort forces compe

much thinner screens than were thought necessary. On paper, and depending on 

number of ships involved, a convoy was supposed to be accompanied by at least s

destroyers. Instead many convoys had only one escort on much of their route.42 T

everyone’s surprise and contrary to the Admiralty’s dire forebodings, it turned ou

even a few or relatively poorly armed vessels often deterred all but the most intre

boat commanders. Contrary to what may seem common sense, there proved to b

direct relationship between the number of ships in the convoy and the number o

escorts needed. Larger convoys did require more escorts, but proportionately few

than small convoys. That is so because the number of ships needed for a screen is 

mined by the size of the convoy’s perimeter, not the number of ships per se. It ha

learned, in fact—though only after analysis many years after the war—that the la

the convoy the safer the ship.43

Shipping interests feared that delays and port congestion, and therefore lowered 

ing power, would be one of convoying’s unavoidable consequences. Delays would 

in any number of ways. First, many vessels would have to make intermediate voy

from their ports of loading to ports of concentration; there they would have to w

while the convoy was being collected. Next, once the convoy was under way, the f

ships would have to reduce their speed to that of the slowest in the convoy. Finall

there would be more delays when the ships arrived in their ports of discharge, wh

facilities were not designed to handle the “pulse arrivals” of large groups of ships

added worry from the point of view of the authorities concerned the effect of the

delays on the delivery rate of goods. These were all reasonable and, to a degree, ju

arguments. From the perspective of the overall war effort, though, they turned o

be manageable. Even Jellicoe, hardly an optimist, acknowledged that the feared

turnaround problem associated with the sudden arrival of large numbers of ship

eventually “enormously decreased.”45 The convoy system did adversely affect deli

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World War II are presumably representative. It was found then that depending on the

route, delivery rates declined by 10 to 14 percent. This must be compared, however,

with the cumulative effect on delivery rates of the much higher ship losses among

“independents,” which was far more serious, at least during World War II.46

Many of the war-winning advantages of the convoy system would become evident only

after it had been put into practice. Some would be realized only many years afterward,

when the raw statistics were finally evaluated with the help of the sophisticated tools of

analysis that have collectively become known as operational (or operations) analysis.

But in April 1917, the time for prevarication and worry over the real and perceived

risks of convoying was rapidly running out. The reality was that even if convoying suffered from all the disadvantages the “High Admirals” claimed, it could produce no

worse results than were being obtained by current methods. The problem was—at least

according to Lloyd George—that the Admiralty could not admit to the possibility of a

solution that fell outside its professional expertise:

They were like doctors who, whilst they are unable to arrest the ravages of a disease which gradually

weakening the resistance of the patient despite all their efforts, are suddenly confronted with a new,

unexpected and grave complication. They go about with gloomy mien and despondent hearts. Their

reports are full of despair. It is clear that they think the case is now hopeless. All the same, their only

advice is to persist in the application of the same treatment. Any other suggestion is vetoed. Their

professional honour is involved in not accepting remedies which they have already refused to consider. What makes it difficult to persuade them to try an obvious cure is that it had been urged upon

them by civilians and turned down by the experts with scorn and derision.47

Notes

1. Adm. Sir Reginald Bacon, The Dover Patrol

1915–1917 (London: Hutchinson, 1919), vol

2, p. 114.

2. Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, vol.

1, 1877–1918 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1970), p. 355.

3. Robert M. Grant, U-boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare 1914–1918

(London: Putnam, 1964), pp. 23–26.

4. Henry Newbolt, Naval Operations (London:

Longmans, Green, 1928), vol. 4, p. 347.

5. Ibid., pp. 347–48.

6. C. Ernest Fayle, History of the Great War:

Seaborne Trade (New York: Longmans,

Green, 1923), vol. 3, pp. 90–91.

7. Sir Norman Leslie, “The Convoy System in

1917–18: Convoy and Transportation durin

the War,” in The Naval Review 1919, ed. Earl

Brassey and John Leyland (London: William

Clowes and Sons, 1919), p. 148. Norman

Leslie, later Sir Norman, headed up the Min

istry of Shipping in 1917–18.

8. Ibid., p. 149.

9. Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. 4, p. 371.

10. Leslie, “Convoy System in 1917–18,” p. 148.

11. Vice Adm. K. G. B. DeWar, The Navy from

Within (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939).

12. Ibid., p. 216.

13. Ibid. DeWar blamed Admiralty disapproval

of his habit of interpreting, not just “writing

up,” current operations for what he thought

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letter to Herbert Lewis, a close friend of

Lloyd George and asked him to intervene. It

worked, for within days his ignominious reassignment was canceled.

14. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London:

Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934), vol. 3, p.

1146.

15. “High Admirals” is how Lloyd George labeled the Admiralty’s convoy opponents.

16. Roskill, Hankey, vol. 1, pp. 357–58.

17. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 1173.

18. Admiral of the Fleet, the Rt. Hon. Earl

Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril: Admiralty Policy in 1917 (London: Cassell, 1934), pp. 36–

37.

19. Adm. Sir R. H. Bacon, The Life of John Rushworth Earl Jellicoe (London: Cassell, 1936),

pp. 354, 369.

20. The careers of both officers survived, indeed

thrived. Henderson became a full admiral,

DeWar a vice admiral. One suspects that

long and illustrious family pedigrees in both

cases helped.

21. Cited in Peter Rowland, David Lloyd George:

A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1976),

p. 397.

22. Ibid., p. 396.

23. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 1149.

24. Ibid., p. 1150.

25. Ibid., pp. 1151–55. Also, Lord Hankey, The

Supreme Command 1914–1918 (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1961), vol. 2, pp.

645–48.

26. Ibid., p. 645.

27. Roskill, Hankey, vol. 1, p. 356.

28. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 23/1, War

Cabinet Papers December 9, 1916 to February

28, 1917, “Minutes of a Meeting of the War

Cabinet Held at 10 Downing Street on

Thursday, January 11, 1917 at 5 PM. The

CAB files at Kew contain the War Cabinet

papers.

29. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 1155. The

Norwegian convoy “experiment” was begun

in early April on the initiative of the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Beatty.

Beatty had come strongly around to the

opinion at this time that though success was

far from guaranteed, continuous convoying

9 vessels being sunk in a very small a

the course of six days.” Beatty, letter 

Lord of the Admiralty, 30 April 1917

in Rear Adm. W. S. Chalmers, The Lif

Letters of David Beatty (London: Hod

and Stoughton, 1951), p. 448.

30. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 2

Cabinet Papers March 1st 1917 to Ma

1917, “Minutes of the Meeting of the 

Cabinet Held at 10 Downing Street o

23, 1917.”

31. Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. 4, p. 

32. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperc

in International Politics (Princeton, N

Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 128

33. Jellicoe, Submarine Peril, pp. 98–99.

34. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM1

Trade Division, Naval Staff, “Meeting

at the Admiralty on 23rd February, 1

garding the Practicality of Convoys.”

35. See John Irving, The Smoke Screen of 

(New York: David McKay, 1967), p. 3

36. See Admiralty, Naval Staff, Tactical S

O.U.5243, Instructions for Tactical an

Strategical Exercises January 1921, p. 

able at www.gwpda.org/naval/admts

01.htm.

37. Lloyd George seems to have suspecte

much. According to his memoirs, the 

ing took place without Jellicoe’s havi

sulted the Ministry of Shipping. “It w

highly probable,” Lloyd George wrot

the form in which Admiral Jellicoe p

question might make the seamen fea

they could never carry out properly t

tion keeping and joint manoeuvring 

membership of a convoy demanded.

George, War Memoirs, pp. 1157–58.

38. Günter Krause, U-Boot Alarm: Zur

Geschichte der U-Boot-Abwehr (1914

(Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagsha

1998), p. 68.

39. Newbolt, Naval Operations, vol. 4, p. 

40. The Grand Fleet met the Germans at 

with thirty-seven battleships and bat

cruisers, screened by a total of eighty

destroyers.

41. See, for example, Jellicoe, Submarine 

pp. 112–16.

42. Eric J. Grove, ed., The Defeat of the E

Attack on Shipping 1939–1945 (Alder

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1997), p. 10 and table 5. This is a revised edition of the Royal Navy’s Naval Historical

Section’s Naval Staff History, vols. 1A and 1B,

first completed in 1957. Its principal author

was Lt. Cdr. D. W. Waters, RN. Despite its title, the book contains some valuable data on

the U-boat campaign of World War I.

43. Ibid., p. 37. Waters, who was largely responsible for this finding, formulated and

of being attacked to a ship in convoy varies

inversely as the size of the convoy.

44. See Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 3, pp

97–98.

45. Jellicoe, Submarine Peril, p. 97.

46. Grove, Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping 1939–1945, pp. 308–10.

47. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 1148–49.

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“We Run a Great Risk of Losing the War”

On the day, 10 April 1917, on which Sims made “the all-important discovery . . . 

Britain did not control the seas,” losses at sea were relatively light.1Three ships w

torpedoed, but only two sank. At this point, though, few among Britain’s politica

military leadership doubted that the country was close to economic and military-stra

disaster. In a strong memorandum dated 29 March, Hankey urged “the most dra

measures,” including “switch shipping from moving ammunition to bringing wh

from the United States and Canada.”2

He effectively called for scaling back the wa

effort to prevent a national food crisis. The gravity of the food crisis became pain

evident in the War Cabinet’s decision two days afterward to extend rationing to t

trenches—the soldiers would have one potato-less day and fewer potatoes the oth

days.3

The hemorrhage of allied and neutral trading fleets meanwhile continued 

pace the completion of replacement shipping and the turnaround time for ships

brought in for repair. Chances were that the one British ship that managed to esc

destruction on the day of Sims’s visit had either been so damaged that it had to b

ten off or, if not, would not go back to sea for five months. The fact was that for 

five ships sunk worldwide, a sixth was damaged; thus, during the first half of 191

total of 770,000 tons of shipping were damaged. About 50 percent of the damage

sels were beyond repair and could be considered permanently lost.4

According to 

report, the other 50 percent required an average repair time of four months per s

and a fifth month to return to service.5

In other words, if the Germans were corre

their calculation that it would take five to six months to bring Britain to its knees

aging a ship had about the same effect as sinking it.

The three weeks after the Jellicoe-Sims meeting proved to be decisive in setting in

motion the strategic solution that ultimately defeated the U-boat. When he met w

Sims, Jellicoe was still giving the Admiralty’s stock answer when it came to convo

not enough destroyers, problems with station keeping, etc.6

But in the undramat

words of the author of History of the Great War: Seaborne Trade, the “unpreceden

losses suffered during the last fortnight of April, especially in the approach areas

CHAPTER FOUR

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convoy system.”7

Lloyd George’s hand was strengthened in particular when he found on

a visit to the Grand Fleet on 13 April that its commander, Admiral Beatty, strongly sup

ported convoying. He had also learned that Sims backed the idea.

The War Cabinet, including Jellicoe, met again on 23 April. The First Sea Lord gave a

bleak report, “The Submarine and Food Supply.” Again, the Admiralty could offer no

solutions other than to build up the country’s supply. Jellicoe also proposed the construction of lots of small cargo ships, which “would be more immune from attack,” as

well as a handful of very large, “unsinkable” vessels.8

Lloyd George reminded him that

both Beatty and Sims favored the convoy option. The message must have been clear:

the convoy idea was no longer just a will-o’-the-wisp, the idea of a handful of civilians

and junior naval officers; it now had the backing of Britain’s most senior fleet commander as well as the senior naval representative of Britain’s new ally. Jellicoe agreed to

“make a further report on the matter,” but Lloyd George was evidently less than convinced that this was not another stalling tactic.9

His assessment, as reported in his auto

biography, was that it “was clear that the Admiralty did not intend to take any effective

steps in the direction of convoying.”10 Two days later, on 25 April, he received War

Cabinet approval to visit the Admiralty on 30 April in order to, in his own words, “take

peremptory action on the question of convoys.”11

The Admiralty knew what was coming. Before placing the matter before the War Cabinet, Lloyd George had informed the First Lord, Edward Carson, of his plan. Matters

must have been rather hectic during the next few days. On 26 April, the head of the

Admiralty’s Anti-Submarine Division, Admiral Duff, gave Jellicoe a memorandum

arguing that, thanks in part to the American entry into the war, the time had come to

start an ocean convoy system.12 Jellicoe approved it the next day, so that when the prim

minister made his entry into the Admiralty Board Room on 30 April, he found his task

in Hankey’s words, “greatly simplified.”13 The Admiralty set up a Convoy Committee to

take charge of organizing the system, and the first, experimental convoys, one from

Gibraltar and the other from Hampton Roads, set sail on 10 and 24 May, respectively.14

By September, the system was in “full swing” for the Atlantic and Gibraltar trade. Nota

bly excluded until mid-1918, ostensibly for a lack of escorts, was the Mediterranean.15

The Reluctant Counterrevolutionaries

Historians are at odds still over the dynamics of the Admiralty’s late and sudden conversion to the convoy system. The most dramatic version of events in the Admiralty

Board Room on 30 April has been passed on by Lloyd George’s close friend Sir Max

Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook). In his story,

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was possibly an unprecedented action. It was well within the powers and competence of the Pr

Minister; yet there may be no parallels in our history. For one afternoon the Prime Minister to

the full reins of Government from the head of a major department of state. . . . The meeting w

minor triumph for the Prime Minister. . . . Lloyd George had staged a deliberate encounter 

Naval High Command, and had emerged triumphant.16

Most later commentators have doubted Beaverbrook’s account of events. Hankey

attended the meeting, makes no mention of the implied drama. John Terraine be

that the story is “good stuff for the port and brandy or the gossip columns, but fo

nothing else.” The decision to convoy, he writes, had been made three days earlie

Lloyd George’s own biographer claims that when the prime minister arrived, the

already been an “eleventh-hour conversion on the subject of convoys” and that th

turned out to be an “amicable affair.”18 Curiously, Jellicoe’s biographer, Admiral B

has written that according to Admiral Duff, who was present at the meeting, “it w

anti-submarine work and not convoy that was discussed” and that “the interview 

way affected the introduction of the convoy system.”19 What matters, of course, a

the particulars of Lloyd George’s visit but whether the prime minster was the key 

convoy decision or merely wanted to place his political imprimatur on a decision 

had already been made. The answer touches on the debate of more recent years o

whether military innovation tends to come from within the military or mostly o

under the prodding of civilians.20

Today, many decades after the events of April 1917, opinions remain sharply divi

The Admiralty’s defenders naturally enough insist that the decision was the Adm

ralty’s. It had been admittedly slow in coming, but this was justified by the need f

deliberate and careful evaluation of the risks involved. Such an evaluation deman

facts, not the “opinions of amateurs.”21 The “facts” became available with the suc

results of six weeks of “controlled sailings” for the French coal trade. Another key 

was the American entry into the war and the prospect of U.S. Navy destroyers fo

escort duty. According to Bacon, had Jellicoe given in to Lloyd George’s pressure 

“rush[ed] the matter, we might well have incurred a disaster, or a series of disaste

which might have led to the condemnation of the convoy system.”22 A similar opi

was voiced by, not surprisingly, Jellicoe’s First Lord, Edward Carson. In a publish

interview after the war, Carson denounced Lloyd George’s claim of Jellicoe’s opp

to convoy as “the biggest lie ever told.” Jellicoe had not opposed the convoy system 

“required time to organize it.”23 Other, more recent historians also believe that Ll

George’s showdown with the Admiralty was largely an empty gesture. Paul Halpe

one of those, arguing that the crucial decision on convoys had already been made 

was not forced on a reluctant Admiralty on that day.24 Another is John Terraine. H

approvingly cites the observation by Royal Air Force historian Sir Maurice Dean 

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tary or commercial matters.”25 Terraine goes on to recite the Admiralty’s uncertainties

at the time; these men were not hostile to change and innovation as such, but “until

1915, everything about [submarine warfare] was new; there was no previous experienc

for guidance.”26 By April 1917, Terraine would have us believe, the members of the

Admiralty had collected the necessary experience, “on their own initiative,” to

undertake convoying.27

Others have viewed the Admiralty’s acceptance of convoying as reluctant at best. The

historian A. J. P. Taylor is perhaps the best-known spokesman on this side of the argument. He claims that Lloyd George gave the “formal order” that convoys be instituted.2

Not surprisingly, Lloyd George himself takes full credit for putting the Admiralty, as he

had it, “in a chastened mood.”29 Then there is Captain DeWar’s judgment:

In deciding between Mr. Lloyd George and the Official History, one must be guided by the nature of

the evidence on both sides. The case for the prosecution is strongly supported by documentary evidence, written at the time, whereas that for the defence, credits the naval authorities with opinions

and intentions which they only expressed when the war was over. The idea that they were really in

favour of convoy, and only awaited a favourable opportunity to introduce it, is neither borne out by

the facts nor by their own memoranda. The written word stands out and cannot be erased.30

The evidence is mostly circumstantial, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that

DeWar’s assessment is probably closest to the truth. Strictly speaking, Lloyd George did

not “order” the Admiralty to institute the convoy system, and again strictly speaking,

Jellicoe was ready to go ahead with a convoy scheme when the prime minister called on

him. This said, though, it is all but impossible to conclude that the rapidity of the

Admiralty’s conversion—and a conversion it was—was the result largely of growing

pressure from 10 Downing Street. It has been suggested by some authors that Lloyd

George was prepared to fire Jellicoe and the navy’s political head, Edward Carson, had

they again postponed a decision (both were replaced anyway later in the year).31 Be that

as it may, the argument by some of the Admiralty’s apologists, including Jellicoe himself, that it had kept convoying under consideration all along and was merely waiting

prudently for certain conditions to be met lacks conviction.32 None of the surviving

Admiralty memorandums or minute sheets in the archives hints at any consideration

of convoying as a serious option. If there had been any prior to the spring of 1917,

when the necessary conditions were supposedly met, it could reasonably be expected

that the Admiralty would have by then laid the foundation for carrying out the system

if and when activated—convoy marshalling points, routing schedules and schemes, and

so forth. But none of the organizational work started until after the Convoy Committe

was formed in May 1917. The most likely scenario is that the navy’s leadership truly

believed that convoying was a “nonstarter” and then readily found facts and judgments

in support of its view, thereby reinforcing its bias.

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Jellicoe and others have claimed that the Admiralty’s timing of the convoy decisi

made perfect sense in light of the prospect of American assistance. Yet the U.S. N

contribution to the convoy system was quite small compared with that of the Bri

For example, according to a report prepared by Sims’s headquarters in London in 

summer of 1918, U.S. Navy forces engaged in antisubmarine operations in Britis

eastern Atlantic waters at the time amounted to less than 5 percent of the British 

tribution. Seventy percent of all transatlantic convoys were escorted by British de

ers, 27 percent by American warships.33 It should be added also that even though 

vast majority of the U.S. destroyers on escort duty were committed to protecting 

troop convoys that brought the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to Europe, 

of the escort load fell on British destroyers.34 In fact, an internal Admiralty memo

dum prepared for the First Lord on the eve of a visit with U.S. Navy officials in W

ington, D.C., stressed that the American entry into the war had actually put more 

on British ASW resources. The document is worth quoting, in part for what it re

about the persisting attitude toward convoying as a misuse of destroyers at the ex

of their “proper” purpose, hunting U-boats:

When the U.S. came into the war the immediate result—and a very welcome result—was th

tion of their destroyers to European waters. As the American Army began to appear in France

ever, . . . instead of the U.S. advent into the war causing a net augmentation to the Naval Force

Alliance, the demands for safeguarding American seaborne traffic increased so enormously th

ing at the matter purely from a Naval point of view, they have become a tax on the Alliance. T

has entirely fallen upon the British with the result that we have had to utilize essential forces, i

for hunting the submarine, in order to escort the American supplies across the seas; and altho

was a quite unavoidable development, the figures of enemy submarines sunk and submarines 

mission at the present moment are a striking commentary on this subject.35

In terms of sheer numbers, there never was a dearth of potential British and allie

escorts. The problem was that even as the convoy system came into full bloom, m

escort-capable ships were still committed to wasteful hunt-and-kill and “protecte

lane” patrols. According to one source, only 257 out of a fleetwide total of 5,018 

warships, or 5.1 percent, were committed to escort duties.36 It is tempting to spec

that the Admiralty seized on the prospect of American destroyers as a way to pre

its professional self-esteem in agreeing to a decision it knew at this point would b

made with or without it.

“It Is the Convoy System Which Baulked Germany”

On 13 October 1918, with the armies of the Central Powers in collapse and final 

victory around the corner, the Admiralty’s First Lord told American newspaper r

ers that it was the convoy system that had “baulked Germany when she adopted a

edly the inhuman and ruthless method of submarine warfare considered inconce

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disagreed that the convoy system was the key to defeating the revolutionary changes in

sea warfare wrought by the submarine. It was a success by any measure, the most

important one being, of course, the minimization of losses of ships and cargoes. Surprisingly, perhaps—or so it seemed at first—escorts on convoy screens also turned out

to be more productive U-boat killers than their counterparts on dedicated seek-anddestroy patrols. To be sure, the effectiveness of the convoy “antidote” did not become

obvious until the spring of 1918. Until then, the U-boats continued to sink a monthly

average of nearly 400,000 tons. Even this number underestimates the actual scale of

continuing losses, for it does not include an average monthly loss of forty thousand

tons due to irreparable damage or another thirty thousand due to marine casualties.

Meanwhile, worldwide production of new shipping managed to compensate for only

half of the losses.38 The Admiralty therefore had good reason in the summer of 1917 to

present the War Cabinet with a rather gloomy prognosis. With a projected monthly

loss rate of 650,000 tons and a national shipbuilding capacity that replaced only a fifth

of this number each month, the country was, in the words of an Admiralty memorandum, in a “very serious position.” The submarine campaign would not likely force Brit

ain to stop the war, but this could only be guaranteed “if America puts forth her

utmost effort.”39 It was only starting in April 1918 that monthly losses consistently fell

below 300,000 tons, and it was only in May that Lloyd George could confidently

announce that although the U-boat continued to be a threat, it was no longer a danger.40

The statistics of the convoy system’s success are well known. Out of nearly eighty-four

thousand ships convoyed between February 1917 and October 1918, 257 were sunk, for

a loss rate of 0.30 percent. During the same period, 1,500 independents were lost, for a

loss rate of 5.93 percent. Put in another way, 85.5 percent of the losses suffered came

from independents.41 On the “offensive” side of the ledger, convoy escorts were responsible for sinking twenty-four out of the forty U-boats sunk by surface vessels during

the last fifteen months of the war. Hunting patrols accounted for one, with the balance

of fifteen being the work of ships patrolling protected lanes.42 Putting these two sets of

figures together—ships lost versus U-boats sunk—Arthur J. Marder has calculated an

exchange rate of 19 : 1 for convoyed ships and 140 : 1 for independents. Escorts were

the responsible “killers” in the first case, hunting forces and standing patrols in the second. Marder is fully justified in claiming that these figures fully dispel any question

about the comparative effectiveness of convoying.43

The reason for the convoy’s success is far less to be found in the defensive capacity of it

screen of escorts (which, it must be remembered, still did not have the ability to detect

an underwater enemy) than in the convoy’s ability to, for practical purposes, disappear.

Depending on its size, a convoy might occupy an area from four to ten square miles—

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have desired.”44 In truth, and contrary to expectations, a moving ten-square-mile 

angle somewhere among the millions of square miles of the ocean amounts to a 

small target. Put differently, the probability of a submarine encountering at least 

out of, say, forty ships sailing independently is much higher than its chance of fa

upon a forty-ship convoy. Admiral Sims wrote that, also contrary to the popular 

ception, the convoy and its destroyer screen constituted an offensive system, one t

compelled the U-boats to fight for every ship they meant to attack.45 The U-boat

ated singly (experimental operations with coordinated pairs were begun in late 1

which meant that if a convoy was sighted, a boat rarely had a chance to complete 

than one attack. This explains why, out of the hundreds of convoys, involving som

ninety-five thousand vessels that were attacked by U-boats, only 393 ships were s

If the convoy system reversed the offense/defense balance by forcing the U-boat t

itself in harm’s way, it also served to overturn the balance between “hide” and “se

That is, by “emptying” the seas of hundreds of defenseless merchantmen scattere

everywhere, the convoy organizers had shifted the burden of finding the enemy a

from the ASW defender and onto the attacking submarine.47 Karl Dönitz, who w

lead the U-boats’ second battle of the Atlantic in World War II but was a young U

commander in 1918, noted that the “oceans at once became bare and empty.”48

Empirical support for this observation lies in that fact, for example, that of the 2

convoys that crossed the Atlantic between October and December 1917, only thir

nine were spotted.49

Thanks to its excellent radio-intercept organization, the Admiralty ensured that t

oceans were even emptier than they would have been “naturally.” Convoying, unl

boat hunting, lent itself admirably to the work of the U-boat-tracking section th

been set up in “Room 40,” the Admiralty’s intelligence division. As has already be

noted, throughout the war the Admiralty had quite reliable intelligence about th

eral whereabouts and comings and goings of the U-boats. The problem was that 

information was rarely accurate and current enough to be useful at the tactical le

submarine hunting. But it was perfectly adequate to alert an incoming convoy an

divert it away from an area of suspected submarine concentration. It had been im

ble to warn ships sailing independently, not only because no one ashore could kn

from one day to the next where every vessel was, but also because many older shi

had no wireless.50 The convoy system, on the other hand, gave naval planners the 

to fuse U-boat intelligence with complete “situational awareness” about the locat

friendly shipping. As a result, wrote a postwar Admiralty monograph, “for the fir

time one could see the latest information as to enemy submarines side by side wi

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wireless, it was possible at once to divert a convoy from a dangerous area.”51

There remains today a minor debate of sorts as to what exactly made the convoy so

successful: was it the ring of defensive escorts, which, even if it did not sink U-boats,

had a deterrent effect or made attacks more difficult, or was it evasive routine? Patrick

Beesly admits it is impossible to calculate how many ships were saved due to rerouting

but believes the numbers to have been significant.52 Sims was more certain that evasive

routing was the key to the convoy’s success. In The Victory at Sea he goes so far as to

point out “the interesting fact that, even had there been no destroyer escort, the convoy

itself would have formed a great protection to merchant shipping.”53 Elsewhere, he is

quoted as declaring, “History will show, when all the facts are known, that more shipping was saved through . . . keeping track of submarines and routing ships clear of

them than by any other single measure.”54 It is curious that this particular benefit had

not been anticipated. After all, one of the biggest handicaps of fleet commanders in the

past had always been the difficulty of finding the enemy fleet, especially when it did not

want to be found.

Even with the convoy system in full operation and with growing evidence that it

worked, allied naval planners continued to pursue a variety of “offensive” schemes. Two

of the more dramatic ones were the Zeebrugge blocking operation and the great

“Northern Barrage.” The former, carried out in April 1918, was aimed at bottling up

the Flanders U-boat flotilla by barricading the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend.

The Ostend portion of the assault was an unequivocal failure. The Zeebrugge portion,

which involved the sinking of three old cruisers filled with concrete, was hailed as a tre

mendous victory; eight Victoria Crosses were awarded. In truth, a few weeks after the

attack British intelligence knew that U-boat traffic had not been stopped. According to

Marder, the operation’s strategic effect was “almost nil, since nothing material was in

fact achieved.”55

The Northern (or North Sea) Barrage was the U.S. Navy Department’s favorite ASW

project. Approved by the allies in September 1917, it involved mining the 240 miles

separating the Orkney Islands from the Norwegian coast. A huge Anglo-American fleet

went to work six months later, depositing the first of 100,000 mines (the original plan

called for twice that number). In the event, about seventy thousand mines were laid; as

far as is known, four to six U-boats were sunk and a few more damaged.56 Ironically,

more allied minelaying ships than that were sunk or damaged due to the tendency of

the mines to explode prematurely. The war ended before the barrier was completed, so

it is difficult to offer a final verdict on its effectiveness. The fact that it was created at all,

though, is indicative of the lukewarm acceptance by the Admiralty (and the Americans

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rian of World War II, Captain S. W. Roskill, on this point:

Even if the ready acceptance of the original proposal [for the Northern Barrage] can, at any ra

explained by the fact that, at the time, the convoy strategy had not yet fully proved itself, its ex

was continued long after the success of the ancient principle was beyond all doubt. Indeed the 

idea of the Northern barrage underlines the lack of the Admiralty’s faith in the strategy of con

escort.57

Notes

1. Rear Adm. William Sowden Sims, The Victory at Sea (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,

Page, 1921), p. 21 [emphasis in the original].

2. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 21/95,

Hankey to PM in minute sheet, 29 March

1917, “Immediate Measures to Be Taken regarding the Food Shipping Problem.”

3. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 23/2, War

Cabinet Papers, March 1st, 1917, to May 30th,

1917. At the time, there were already two

meatless and two potato-less days in the

public eating facilities in Britain.

4. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB23/2, Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet Held at

10 Downing St. on August 2, 1917, Admiralty memorandum, “The Submarine

Campaign.”

5. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1807, Private Correspondence of Sir Eric

Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty 1917–

1919, vol. 4, “Report by Director of Statistics,

Admiralty, May 21, 1918.”

6. Michael Simpson, ed., Anglo-American Naval

Relations 1917–1919 (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower

for the Navy Records Society, 1991), pp. 25,

40–41.

7. C. Ernest Fayle, History of the Great War:

Seaborne Trade (New York: Longmans,

Green, 1923), vol. 3, p. 100.

8. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 23/2,

Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet

Held at 10 Downing St. on April 23, 1917,

Admiralty report, “The Submarine and Food

Supply.”

9. Ibid.

10. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London:

Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934), vol. 3, p.

1162.

11. Ibid.

12. Admiral of the Fleet, the Rt. Hon. Ea

Jellicoe, The Submarine Peril: Admira

icy in 1917 (London: Cassell, 1934), p

13. Lord Hankey, The Supreme Comman

1918 (London: George Allen and Un

1961), vol. 2, p. 651.

14. The Convoy Committee’s membersh

cluded four Royal Navy officers and 

the Ministry of Shipping. It is interes

that none of the officers ranked high

captain.

15. Fayle, History of the Great War, vol. 3

141–42.

16. Lord Beaverbrook, Men and Power (L

Hutchinson, 1956), pp. 155–56, cited 

Terraine, The U-boat Wars 1916–194

York: Henry Holt, 1989), p. 59.

17. Terraine, U-boat Wars 1916–1945, p. 

18. Peter Rowland, David Lloyd George: A 

raphy (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 

19. Adm. Sir R. H. Bacon, The Life of Joh

worth Earl Jellicoe (London: Cassell, 

p. 360.

20. The innovation-from-within theory 

been advanced most cogently by Step

Rosen, Winning the Next War (Ithaca

Cornell Univ. Press, 1991). The impo

of civilian intervention is highlighted 

Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Milita

trine: France, Britain, and Germany b

the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornel

Press, 1984).

21. “Opinions of amateurs” is the phrase 

by a Royal Navy officer who sat in on

Jellicoe’s meeting with the captains o

chant ships, cited in Bacon, Life of Jo

Rushworth Earl Jellicoe, p. 355.

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23. Cited in ibid., p. 389.

24. Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World

War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press,

1994), p. 361.

25. Terraine, U-boat Wars 1916–1945, p. 58.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., p. 59.

28. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945

(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books,

1970), pp. 121–24.

29. Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 3, p. 1163.

30. Vice Adm. K. G. B. DeWar, The Navy from

Within (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), pp.

220–21.

31. Joachim Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers

(Bonn: Bernard and Graefe Verlag, 2003), p.

368.

32. It is interesting to note that the Royal Navy’s

official website refers to Jellicoe as having

opposed and implemented convoying; see

www.royal-navy.mod.uk/statis/pages/3523

.html.

33. Intelligence Section, U.S. Naval Headquarters, London, “A Brief Summary of United

States Navy Activities in European Waters

with an Outline of the Organization of Admiral Sims’s Headquarters,” memorandum,

3 August 1918, cited in Simpson, AngloAmerican Naval Relations 1917–1919, pp.

171–74.

34. For example, in the summer of 1918 British

destroyers escorted roughly 62 percent of

U.S. troops arriving in England. Ibid., p. 173.

35. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1189, Private Correspondence of Sir Eric

Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty 1917–

1919, vol. 6, “Notes for Guidance as to the

Line to Be Adopted in Conference with U.S.

Navy Department and in Informal Discussions,” undated.

36. Günter Krause, U-Boot Alarm: Zur

Geschichte der U-Boot-Abwehr (1914–1945)

(Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagshaus,

1998), p. 72. See also Vice Adm. Sir Peter

Gretton, “The U-boat Campaign in Two

World Wars,” in Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century, 1900–1945: Essays in Honour of

Arthur Marder, ed. G. Jordan (London:

Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 130–34. In August

1917, almost three thousand vessels were

duties, two hundred perhaps of which were

committed to convoy escort duties. The figure of three thousand is taken from Nationa

Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB 23/2, War Cabinet

Papers, June 5th, 1917 to August 30th, 1917,

Minutes of a Meeting of the War Cabinet on

August 2, 1917, Admiralty memorandum on

“The Submarine Campaign.” The estimate

that fewer than two hundred ships were ded

icated to convoy escorting is based on

Jellicoe’s data in Jellicoe, Submarine Peril, pp

162–63. The Royal Navy’s staff study reports

that ninety-one destroyers and other vessels

were available for ocean convoys in July

1917. The maximum number was reached in

April 1918, when 195 were available; Eric J.

Grove, ed., The Defeat of the Enemy Attack o

Shipping 1939–1945 (Aldershot, U.K.:

Ashgate for the Navy Records Society, 1997)

table 4. Marder reports that in October 1918

257 British warships were directly engaged

in convoy escort. Even if, as he suggests,

another five hundred served as occasional

escorts, the total of 757 would add up to

only 25 percent of Britain’s overall seagoing

ASW effort. See Arthur J. Marder, From the

Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 5, 1918–

1919: Victory and Aftermath (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 105.

37. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 116/

1809, Private Correspondence of Sir Eric

Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty 1917–

1919, vol. 6, “Statement by Geddes to U.S.

Press, October 13, 1918.”

38. The Admiralty reported in May 1918 that

about a half-million tons of shipping were

lost annually due to irreparable war damage

See National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM116/

1807, Private Correspondence of Sir Eric

Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1917–

1919, vol. 4, “Report by Director of Statistics, Admiralty, May 21, 1918.” Losses due to

marine risk are reported in ADM167/153,

Copy of Board Minute, Meetings of the Boar

of Admiralty, August 1917 to December 1918,

“Admiralty Draft Memorandum to War

Cabinet of 8 February, 1918.”

39. National Archives, Kew, U.K., CAB23/3, War

Cabinet Papers, June 5th 1917 to August 30th

1917, Minutes of August 2, 1917, Memorandum by Admiralty on “The Submarine

Menace.”

40. Cited in Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p

390.

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ping 1939–1945, table 1.

42. Ibid., p. 10.

43. Marder, 1918–1919: Victory and Aftermath, p.

103.

44. Sims, Victory at Sea, p. 135.

45. Ibid., p. 110.

46. Krause, U-Boot Alarm, p. 69.

47. See Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–1918 (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 260.

48. Cited in ibid.

49. Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, p. 372.

51. Ibid., pp. 261–62.

52. Ibid., p. 261.

53. Sims, Victory at Sea, p. 130.

54. Cited in Robert M. Grant, U-boat Int

1914–1918 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon 

1969), p. 12.

55. Marder, 1918–1919: Victory and Afte

p. 61.

56. Grant, U-boat Intelligence 1914–1918

57. S. W. Roskill, The Strategy of Sea Pow

(London: Collins, 1962), p. 135, cited 

Marder, 1918–1919: Victory and Afte

p. 76.

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Conclusion

In his account of World War I, Churchill labeled the convoy decision “the decis

step” that defeated the U-boats. He even cites the escorts’ successful “offensive

actions.”1

Yet a world war later, when convoying again proved the salvation of all

shipping, he confided that “I always sought to rupture this defensive obsession by

searching for forms of counteroffensive. . . . I could not rest content with the pol

‘convoy and blockade.’”2

Together, the two pronouncements fairly sum up the co

ing ambivalence among many senior naval officers on the subject of the convoy. 

logical and empirical measure, convoying had clearly shown itself to be the most

haps only, effective means of defeating the submarine’s tonnage-sinking capacity

worked, and everyone, even skeptics, agreed it did. Yet for many officers this was 

enough—they simply did not like it. Which raises the question, of course: Why w

Admiralty so resistant to the convoy system to begin with? And when it proved it

worth, why were the admirals quite ready to abandon it and concentrate resource

instead on the fruitless hunt-and-kill method? This concluding section seeks to a

these questions in the hope that the answers will shed further light on the nature 

military innovation—or more precisely, on the nature of resistance to innovation

this case counter-innovation.

One theory holds that Lloyd George’s “High Admirals” were innately incapable o

change, that among the world’s admiralties, the British Admiralty took first place 

hideboundness.3

It is certainly true that navies generally, the Royal Navy in partic

have tended to be more traditionalist than sister services on land and in the air a

have often been resistant to “interference,” especially from the outside, in what th

believe are their institutional core missions and capabilities. This said, though, th

ish navy and its leadership on the eve of World War I do not come across as mor

innovation than other navies of the period. On the contrary, a fair argument can 

made that the men who directed the Royal Navy in 1914–18 had been and still w

the cutting edge of technical innovation at the time. When Jellicoe took over as F

Sea Lord in 1917, he had already been in the navy for forty-five years. During tho

years, his navy had changed from muzzle-loading to breech-loading guns; torped

torpedo boats, and mines had joined the naval armories; wireless communication

became standard equipment; and of course, the submarine and aircraft had been 

duced. The Royal Navy during the two decades or so leading up to World War I w

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tions, and even airborne “ocean surveillance.”4

In short, Jellicoe’s navy was “thoroughly

modern.”5

There are two caveats, though. First, the navy had little difficulty in accepting and

encouraging innovations that promised to improve what it saw as its “essential”

missions and capabilities. Those turned mainly on the efficiency of the battle fleet—

more accurate and longer-range firepower, improved radio signaling, and so forth. Less

likely to be embraced were innovations that did not obviously fit the institution’s selfimage of an offensive battle force. An example is the Admiralty’s rejection in 1902 of a

proposal to use captive balloons for submarine detection.6

Submarines, let alone antisubmarine measures, were far removed from the navy’s “organizational essence” in

1902.7

The second caveat is that the navy’s willingness to experiment with and adopt

new technologies was largely limited to the material side of the fleet. Ever since the

industrial revolution at sea, when sailing fleets gave way to ironclads, the intellectual

milieu of the navy had been dominated by the “material school.” Officers had become

preoccupied with technical developments, and what passed for “strategy” had been

images of war based on the (perceived) material possibilities of the fleet, not a careful

analysis of national needs and the threats to those needs.8

In this mind-set there was lit

tle room for strategic or tactical innovativeness. The rare officer on the eve of World

War I who dared question the Admiralty’s fixation on a dreadnought-style battle of

Trafalgar risked banishment to a distant and prospectless colonial cruiser station.9

Jellicoe was a dedicated materialist; he had specialized in gunnery, not strategic planning (which was not something in which officers could have specialized in any case).

He was dubbed the “granite sailor”—it is not clear why, but the name befits his reputation for stubbornness. Being stubborn in the face of adversity can be a positive asset,

but in Jellicoe’s case it unfortunately also translated into an excessive loyalty to “the

plan” and a resistance to adaptation when circumstances changed.10 The “plan” in 1914

and still in 1917, was, first, to blockade Germany, and second, to keep the High Sea

Fleet in jail or, should it break out, send it to the bottom of the sea. It was, according to

one of Jellicoe’s more sympathetic biographers, “the only basically sane strategy.”11 It

was also a “familiar” strategy; denying the enemy’s trade and bottling up his fleet

through command of the sea had long been among the Royal Navy’s tried and true

“principles.” Convoying, on the other hand, was an unknown. No one knew whether it

would work, the risks of failure seemed substantial, and if stubbornness was one trait

of Jellicoe’s, caution and averseness to risk were two others. He was temperamentally

suited to resist “eccentric pressures for change.”12

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arguably the sine qua non of government bureaucracies. There is no evidence tha

Admiralty was an exception—on the contrary. This suggests that an alternative, o

sibly reinforcing, explanation for its long-delayed convoy decision is to be found 

organization’s structure. Two aspects of the Admiralty in particular seem to have 

tated against a rapid and radical response to the U-boat threat. First, this was an

extremely hierarchical organization, in which the discussion of naval strategic op

was tightly concentrated at the very top, the Board of Admiralty. When Jellicoe jo

the board in December 1916, it was being expanded from three to five senior adm

(the Sea Lords) and was presided over by a civilian cabinet minister, the First Lor

then Sir Edward Carson. With responsibility for operations, the First Sea Lord, in 

case Jellicoe, was primus inter pares. Incredible as it sounds, the First Sea Lord, w

headed the largest and most powerful fleet in the world and was responsible for t

design and execution of its war plans, did not have a staff, properly speaking, unt

the disastrous Dardanelles campaign. To be sure, a rudimentary staff, the Operat

Division, headed up by a two-star Chief of the War Staff, had been in existence si

shortly before the war, but only at the insistence of the then First Lord, Winston 

chill, and despite the protestations of his First Sea Lord, “Jackie” Fisher. Fisher’s p

cessor, Sir Arthur Wilson, had resigned rather than assist in bringing a naval staff 

being.13 Fisher made sure, though, that the Admiralty’s new “Thinking Establishm

(Fisher’s term) were kept at arm’s length, noting with considerable glee after the 

that only he and Admiral Wilson “knew the Naval plan of war.”14 It is no surprise 

this first attempt at a staff did not attract many bright, career-minded officers.

After the report on the Dardanelles fiasco was published, the posts of First Sea Lo

and Chief of the War Staff were merged. Also created in support of the new First 

Lord qua Chief of Naval Staff (CNS) were the new posts of Assistant Chief of Na

Staff (ACNS) and Deputy Chief of Naval Staff (DCNS). Both were given seats on 

board. In theory, this was an improvement, but in reality it was not until after Wo

War I that the naval staff became a modern system worthy of the name.15

The Operations Division, which ostensibly served as Jellicoe’s naval staff, numbe

between two dozen and thirty officers.16 As Captain DeWar recalled in his book, o

paper this looked pretty imposing. Unfortunately, he wrote, none of the officers 

had any staff training, their actual work had little to do with operations, and mo

kept busy with menial tasks that, according to DeWar, could have been easily han

by clerks.

The preoccupation of experienced officers with minutiae pervaded the Admiralt

up to the top. Again according to DeWar, the men who were in charge of a global 

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of by local commanders.17 Neither did it help that Jellicoe was by nature a micromanager who, for example, would involve himself directly in the choice of the caliber

of guns to be put on merchantmen. It is not particularly surprising, then, that a military organization whose senior leadership was preoccupied with the day-to-day business of the fleet and whose junior officers were discouraged from independent thinking

found it difficult to look at the U-boats as a strategic and analytical problem.

There is a large body of organizational theory that is virtually unanimous in the opinion that hierarchical organizations are not likely incubators of innovation. If we are to

believe John Sculley, chief executive officer and president of Apple Computers, “innovation has never coeme through bureaucracy and hierarchy. It’s always come from indi

viduals.”18 Sculley overstates the case; plenty of innovative success stories have

emanated from extremely hierarchically structured organizations, including the military. But if a military hierarchy is to generate innovation, it must operate under at least

these two conditions: first, the organization’s leadership must limit its control to providing broad strategic guidance; and second, the leadership should encourage, indeed

expect, subordinates to be flexible in translating this guidance into practical options. In

short, the organization should be one that combines a high degree of centralized command over broad strategic goals with a de-centralized control over tactical and

operational execution.

Closely related is the second condition, that the organization foster a strong prointellectual environment—that is to say, an environment in which the organization’s

members (in the case of the military, midgrade officers) are encouraged and rewarded

for defining problems and advancing solutions that may not conform with agreed

policy or doctrine. This also means that the organization must provide and value a

strong analytical capability. There is a tendency still in military organizations to confuse analysis with “professional judgment,” dismissing the former as overly academic

and irrelevant to the “real world” of the military, while holding up the latter as common sense, embedded in sound military experience.

In truth, there is no inherent conflict between the two. In some circumstances, especially those with ample precedent, acting by the book and without further analysis may

be quite adequate—but it usually is not. Analysis becomes absolutely mandatory, however, when the problem at hand is entirely novel and we cannot turn to experience,

doctrine, or established policy for solutions-that-worked-in-the-past. Analysis is the

basic tool of problem solving and innovation; without analysis we may not even be abl

to recognize the problem. An organization will not likely innovate if it is pervaded by

anti-intellectualism and does not value analytical inquiry.

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ing giant” that was organizationally incapable of visualizing the U-boat problem 

other than the pre-U-boat tactical, or at best operational, terms.19 A report by the

American novelist Winston Churchill (no relation to the prime minister) to Pres

Wilson on the state of the Admiralty was scathing on this score:

I have become convinced that the criticism of the British Admiralty to the effect that it has bee

from day to day, that it has been making no plans ahead, is justified. The several Sea Lords are 

conservative school, and they have been so encumbered by administrative and bureaucratic du

that they have found insufficient time to decide upon a future strategy. The younger and more 

native element of that service has not been given a chance to show its powers, nor has it been c

sulted in matters of strategy. . . . [T]he Admiralty is still suffering from the inertia of a traditio

clings to the belief that the British navy still controls the seas, and can be made to move but slo

new direction.20

This was an organization with a structure and culture that made failure to innov

against the submarine almost unavoidable. This was more than just a hierarchy t

by a handful of men who shared the same values and beliefs about the nature and

“rules” of war at sea. That handicap could have been overcome if the Admiralty h

been a “command hierarchy,” in which the board provided and oversaw the overa

strategic direction of the war but left the responsibility for operational and tactic

planning with a war staff. But this was a “control hierarchy,” run by leaders who h

never managed to make the transition from the narrow tactical and operational e

ness required of them when commanding ships or fleets to the broader outlook

demanded of strategic leadership. These were micromanagers who insisted on re

the tight tactical control they had been accustomed to on board their ships.21 Dif

ideas or alternative solutions by junior officers on the staff were neither encourag

nor welcomed; worse, those who persisted in questioning current policy risked d

plinary action. The junior officers who dared suggesting different ways of tacklin

U-boats saw their opinions dismissed for their lack of experience (never mind th

one had ever fought an ASW campaign before). Even more objectionable were th

of “laymen”—civilians who, “because of the want of appreciation of the true rela

size of the oceans and of the vessels on them . . . find difficulty in understanding 

naval problems inherent in the protection of commerce.”22

It is no wonder that between the board’s preoccupation with tactical and materia

minutiae, the staff ’s reluctance to voice views contrary to Admiralty policy, and f

the civilian leadership’s habit of deference to the “experts,” the big strategic pictu

rarely contemplated. In any case, the capability to do strategic analysis, to set goa

evaluate alternative strategies, did not exist. Big decisions with large consequence

made in, to put it kindly, a kind of hit-and-miss fashion. The making of naval str

and war plans, Admiral Fisher declared, was a straightforward business that calle

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no need for brains, or at least not brains attuned to thinking strategically, because,

Fisher wrote, modern sea warfare had no secrets. It had become a “pure game of chess,”

whose outcome, thanks to autopropulsion and wireless, had become quite predictable.

What need for analysis was there when the “Germans are just as capable as ourselves of

planning out what is the best thing we can do?”24

Until the very end of the war, the Admiralty’s staff organization was indeed little more

than the “very excellent organization for cutting out and arranging foreign newspaper

clippings” that Fisher had argued could and should be expected of it.25 No wonder that

according to DeWar, no one planned, thought ahead, or investigated the relative merits

and demerits of convoying or patrolling.26 It was not encouraged, and in any case, the

“facts” that would have made possible such a “cost-effectiveness analysis” did not exist,

at least not at the Admiralty. Officers like Henderson and DeWar had to risk their

careers and go to the Ministry of Shipping to find out the basic shipping data that

would have allowed such a comparison. One Royal Navy officer, writing twenty years

after the war, blamed the lack of a naval staff for the Admiralty’s ignorance of the most

basic shipping information. He wrote, “It cannot be regarded as other than remarkable

that, whereas the protection of trade had always been accepted as a principal liability o

the Navy, the prewar Navy had taken no steps to ascertain the exact extent of the liability. It is as if an insurance company agreed to insure a man’s life without troubling to

find out his age, occupation, or state of health.”27

There may be yet another reason why the Admiralty did not collect and maintain current or reliable shipping statistics and yet did maintain minute supervision over the

fleet’s daily dispositions and routines: keeping track of merchant shipping was not seen

as part of the navy’s core business. This is comprehensible from an organizational perspective, for it has long been recognized that organizations tend to pay less attention to

activities that are not considered essential to their basic missions. That is not the same

as saying that the Royal Navy did not see defense of trade as an important responsibility. On the contrary, as the author just cited has remarked, safeguarding trade ranked,

along with defense against invasion and protection of the empire, as a primary strategi

responsibility. The problem was the navy’s operational interpretation of the defense-oftrade strategic priority. Systemic handicaps—excessive centralization, a preoccupation

with administrative and tactical detail, and a pervasive culture of anti-intellectualism—

virtually precluded the Admiralty’s effectiveness as an innovating institution. But overarching all these factors was a more deep-seated problem, namely, the tendency to see

the protection of shipping and the sinking of U-boats as separate and distinct operational problems rather than two parts of a single strategic dilemma. This confusion

helps explain Churchill’s frustration with the (operationally) “defensive” nature of the

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the convoy’s success steadily accumulated, naval planners refused to acknowledge 

failure of the hunting method and repeatedly pleaded that escorts be directed fro

their “defensive” tasks to “offensive” operations.

Two commentaries by the Admiralty’s First Lord, Sir Eric Geddes, are revealing in 

regard. The first was made during an allied naval conference in Rome in Februar

in response to the question of an Italian admiral, Paolo Thaon Di Revel, regardin

whether it was “better to harass and attack the submarines in coming out [of the 

of Otranto], or is it better to defend convoys by means of escorts?” The First Lord

replied it had been the experience so far in both the North Atlantic and North Se

the convoy escorts had

in fact destroyed very few submarines. . . . It is not the escort forces which are really getting 

number of submarines, and while we would be the last to reduce escorts if we could destroy th

submarines by their means, we feel that to go on with a purely defensive measure is an unsu

policy. . . . Very few submarines have been destroyed [in the Mediterranean and Adriatic], and 

only way to deal with the submarine menace is to go from the purely escorting side of the orga

tion on to an offensive organization.28

Geddes’s second comment came in a memorandum on a conference with high-le

U.S. Navy officials in Washington, D.C. Note that the date was 8 October 1918; b

time the German war effort was collapsing. The memorandum itself said the foll

“It had long been realized that defensive measures and offensive-defensive measu

such as the convoy system, although affording a great measure of safety to the m

tile marine and resulting in the destruction of some submarines, were quite inad

by themselves to counter the submarine menace.”29 The paper went on to recomm

resumption of hunting tactics as soon as more forces became available. The Adm

reasoning behind the memorandum makes for even more interesting reading. In

“Notes for Guidance as to the Line to Be Adopted” with the Americans, the “dive

of Royal Navy warships from hunt-and-kill to escorting U.S. troopships was blam

what the Admiralty claimed to be a worsening U-boat picture. The Admiralty’s “

included these highlights:

The demands for safeguarding American seaborne traffic . . . have become . . . from a purely N

point of view . . . a tax on the Alliance [that] has entirely fallen upon the British with the result 

have had to utilize essential forces intended for hunting the submarine. . . . Up to May of this y

submarines were being satisfactorily dealt with. Since May, mainly on account of the diversion 

British hunting forces to American escort work, the submarine situation has steadily become m

formidable, and we are now faced with a tremendous submarine effort on the enemy’s part wh

hunting forces are inadequate for the reasons given. . . . During the last quarter of 1917 and th

quarter of 1918, the British Navy was able . . . effectively to hold the submarine menace, and th

every reason to believe that the destruction of submarines would have continued had the dem

defensive escort not been so vast and imperative. The anti-submarine campaign for 1918 in a gr

measure had to be, and was, abandoned and we must now look to 1919 and lay our plans.30

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The complaint that the demand for escorts had forced the abandonment of the battle

against the U-boats is starkly revealing of the narrow, tactics- and operations-focused

mind-set of the naval leadership at the time. The officers who led and manned the

Royal Navy in 1914–18 were what Barry Posen has called ”specialists in victory.”31 More

precisely, they were specialists in naval victory. Military organizations, according to

Posen, prefer offensive doctrines, for a variety of reasons. For one, it is a long-standing

“principle of war” that only by attacking the enemy can he be defeated. Defensive doctrines, in contrast, have rarely found favor among modern militaries. As Posen puts it,

they are seen as turning soldiers (and sailors) into “specialists in attrition.”32 For the

naval leadership in World War I, victory meant seeking out and defeating the enemy

fleet. This was so at all levels of warfare—strategic, operational, and tactical. The ideal

victory was to be won by defeating the enemy fleet in a decisive battle. Should the

enemy refuse to come out and fight, he was to be bottled up in his ports and harbors.

Either way, the “victor” could now enjoy all the benefits of command of the sea: the

country was secure from invasion, overseas possessions were safe, and friendly ships

could ply the seas without fear of enemy interference. In short, defeating the enemy

fleet promised to fulfill for the Royal Navy, in one operational stroke, every one of its

strategic responsibilities. Defeating the enemy’s war-making capacity at sea was, therefore, the navy’s way of protecting trade.

The various methods employed by the British to cope with the U-boats reflected this

narrow operational perspective. Without a “traditional” enemy fleet to hunt down and

send to the bottom of the sea, the hunting patrols, though largely fruitless, were a facsimile of the “close engagement” and captured its spirit. Success (or its lack) was measured by the number of U-boats killed. It was thanks to the offensive measures

introduced by Jellicoe, as Bacon wrote of his former commander in chief, that the submarine menace had been “practically conquered” by the end of 1917: “We were sinking

submarines at the same rate as they were being produced in Germany.”33 Declines in

merchant ship losses were usually attributed to the success of offensive measures,

whereas increased losses were typically blamed on changes in U-boat tactics or weaponry, not failure by the fleet to reassess its own tactics, let alone strategic vision. The

admirals never managed to escape from the narrow, presubmarine operational paradigm that dominated their “specialization,” that ASW—that is to say, sinking Uboats—and protecting shipping were two different, even competing, tasks. It took

“nonspecialists”—civilians and junior officers not burdened by the legacy of Trafalgar—to elevate the problem of defeating the submarine from the tactical-operational

domain to the strategic level of war. The convoy system shifted the focus of countermeasures away from defeating the U-boat to defeating the U-boat’s war-making purposes

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tionary, way of looking at the problem meant that “sinking submarines is a bonu

a necessity.”34

The story of the invention of the submarine and the subsequent struggle to defea

revolutionary war-making power has a wide range of possible implications, “less

you will, for the “transformation” of the American military today. For one, the u

the submarine for commerce raiding rather than “legitimate” naval warfare again

grey hulls is a reminder that radical military innovations may be used for purpos

in ways neither planned nor anticipated by their originators. The struggle to find 

solution to the U-boat problem of 1914–18 is also a reminder that truly revolutio

military innovations, because they are revolutionary, are extremely difficult to de

using “legacy” techniques at the tactical and operational levels of war. The U-boa

both world wars was never defeated at the force-on-force, tactical level. Its defeat

became possible only when the problem was revisualized as a strategic issue and i

realized that victory or failure hinged on the preservation of shipping and cargoe

“hull counts” of submarines sunk. Redefining the problem from the tactical to st

level of analysis is central to the idea of asymmetric warfare. A clever future oppo

should therefore be expected to counter a high-tech U.S. military by striking aga

strategic vulnerabilities.

Finally and perhaps most obviously, one of the most difficult things for military 

nizations to overcome is their tendency to think of problems and search for solut

within a strategic framework, setting aside the operational culture that defines th

organizational essence. The Royal Navy was in the years before World War I the m

successful navy in memory; its war-fighting culture was naturally centered on th

of the offensive. Its perception of its role and responsibility in the next war was a 

row, operational one—seek out the enemy fleet and sink it; any suggestion that

national interests, such as the protection of trade, might demand a broader persp

was dismissed as “interference” in the business the navy knew best. This outlook, 

which success was measured in narrow naval terms—enemy ships sunk—when c

bined with the Admiralty leadership’s proclivity to micromanage the fleet’s daily 

cal and administrative routines, was bound to produce a culture resistant to chan

Organizational theory proposes that large organizations, especially military ones

to resist tasks and missions that they do not see as part of their cultures. But ther

one exception: an organization will embrace new responsibilities, reluctantly per

when its survival or legitimacy is at stake. The Royal Navy’s legitimacy was in que

in 1917. The British army had been doing almost all the dying on the western fro

while, in the public eye at least, the navy merely “watched and waited” for the Hi

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High Sea Fleet did make its appearance at the end of May 1916, but the outcome was

hardly what the navy’s propagandists had led the British public to expect. Yet, even the

navy’s failure in what it had always insisted was its very raison d’être did not stimulate 

wholesale strategic reassessment of the real war it was, or at least should have been,

fighting. It took the circumvention of the navy’s formal hierarchy by a few relatively

junior officers to make the political leadership aware that the navy’s rejection of the

convoy system had been based in good part on an inflated estimate of the magnitude o

the task. When Lloyd George had the “real” numbers and knew that far fewer resources

were needed than the navy had maintained, he could confidently override the

professionals’ judgment.

Notes

1. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–

1918 (London: Odhams, 1923–27), vol. 2, pp.

1233, 1235. Churchill also pointed out that it

was he, as First Lord of the Admiralty, who

instituted the troopship convoys at the beginning of the war.

2. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War,

vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell,

1948), pp. 262–63.

3. According to one author, speaking with particular reference to the Royal Navy, “In every

major nation the Navy was the most hidebound of the military services, perhaps due

to the habitual isolation of ships at sea from

the dictates of land-based supervisors or being the service most encumbered by tradition.” Tom Shachtman, Terrors and Marvels:

How Science and Technology Changed the

Character and Outcome of World War II

(New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 28.

4. Possibly the earliest experiment in airborne

surveillance of the sea surface took place in

1902, involving a camera-equipped balloon

flight by the Reverend J. M. Bacon across the

Irish Channel. The clergyman had asked the

Admiralty to “grant me the attendance of

some vessel in case of immersion.” The Navy

complied, the flight was successful, and at

least two photographs were taken, proving

that the bottom of the ocean could be photographed from high altitude. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM116/652, “Balloon

Experiments,” Rev. J. M. Bacon in 9 November

1902 letter to the Admiralty regarding his

planned Irish Channel balloon flight. That

same year, Bacon published his classic The

Dominion of the Air: The Story of Aerial

Navigation.

5. Donald M. Schurman, “Admiral Sir John

Jellicoe (1916–1917),” in The First Sea Lords

From Fisher to Mountbatten, ed. Malcolm H

Murfett (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), p

101.

6. The proposal and the Admiralty’s response

are reported in The Dominion of the Air: The

Story of Aerial Navigation, available at www

.worldwideschool.org/.

7. Morton H. Halperin and his co-authors defined “organizational essence” as the view

held by the dominant group in an organization of what the roles and capabilities of the

organization should be. See his Bureaucratic

Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington,

D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974), p. 28.

8. See Commodore Daniel McNeil, “Technology, History and the Revolution in Military

Affairs,” Canadian Military Journal (Winter

2000–2001).

9. Captain, later Admiral, Sir Herbert Richmond was one of the few intellectual dissenters—or, as he called himself and others

like him, “heretics.” After a plum command

of HMS Dreadnought, his unsolicited strategic advice was rewarded with command of

two second-class cruisers. Ibid., p. 10.

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took him time to receive the good message

and longer still to deliver it.” Stanley

Bonnett, The Price of Admiralty: An Indictment of the Royal Navy 1805–1966 (London:

Robert Hale, 1968), p. 204.

11. Schurman, “Admiral Sir John Jellicoe (1916–

1917),” p. 108.

12. Ibid., p. 190.

13. Cdr. Russell Grenfell, The Art of the Admiral

(London: Faber and Faber, 1937), p. 87.

14. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, Memories

(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), p.

102.

15. Malcolm H. Murfett, “The First Sea Lords

(1904–1950): An Overview,” in The First Sea

Lords, ed. Murfett, p. 1.

16. Captain DeWar reports a staff of about two

dozen officers and a couple of civilian assistants; Vice Adm. K. G. B. DeWar, The Navy

from Within (London: Victor Gollancz,

1939), p. 215. Another contemporary account claims that the Admiralty’s “strategical

staff” involved about thirty officers. Winston

Churchill, “Naval Organization, American

and British,” Atlantic (August 1917). The author is not to be confused with Winston

Spencer Churchill, Britain’s prime minister

during World War II; this Winston Churchill

(1871–1947) was an American novelist, who

had the ear of President Wilson. While in

London as an “independent observer,” he

wrote Wilson a number of critical reports on

the British Admiralty.

17. DeWar, Navy from Within, p. 227.

18. Schipul: The Web Marketing Company,

www.schipul.com/.

19. Michael Simpson, ed., Anglo-American Naval

Relations 1917–1919 (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower

for the Navy Records Society, 1991), p. 59.

20. Winston Churchill to President Wilson, 22

October 1917, cited in ibid., pp. 118–19.

21. As Marder has reported, the German naval

high command operated under a very different philosophy. It defined overall strategic

policy for each subsidiary command in brief

“war orders”; beyond intelligence reports

and occasional directives, it did not issue operational orders; Arthur J. Marder, From the

Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 5, 1918–

1919: Victory and Aftermath (London:

contrast was true between the British 

German armies.

22. Adm. Sir R. H. Bacon, The Life of Joh

worth Earl Jellicoe (London: Cassell, 

p. 349.

23. Fisher, Memories, p. 109.

24. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM1

1043B, “War Plans & the Distributio

the Fleet.”

25. Fisher, Memories, p. 108.

26. Cited in Marder, 1918–1919: Victory 

termath, p. 328.

27. Grenfell, Art of the Admiral, p. 87.

28. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM1

1807, Private Correspondence of Sir E

Geddes, 1917–1919, vol. 4, “Report o

Session of Allied Naval Conference, F

ary 8&9, 1918.”

29. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM1

1809, Private Correspondence of Sir E

Geddes, 1917–1919, vol. 6, “Memoran

a Conference Held at the Navy Depa

on 8th October, 1918 to Discuss the 

Situation.”

30. National Archives, Kew, U.K., ADM 

1809, Private Correspondence of Sir E

Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty 19

1919, vol. 6, “Notes for Guidance as t

Line to Be Adopted in Conference w

Navy Department and in Informal D

sions,” undated [emphasis added].

31. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Milita

trine: France, Britain, and Germany b

the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornel

Press, 1984), p. 50.

32. Ibid.

33. Bacon, Life of John Rushworth Earl Je

371. Bacon was basically correct in h

tion that toward the end of 1917 abo

many U-boats were being sunk as ca

the slipways. Twenty-two boats were 

the last quarter of that year, compare

twenty-four added; Joachim Schröde

U-Boote des Kaisers (Bonn: Bernard a

Graefe Verlag, 2003), p. 437. Bacon d

mention that most sinkings were the 

of “defensive” escorts.

34. Marder, 1918–1919: Victory and Afte

p. 103 [emphasis in the original].

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Abbreviations

A ACNS Assistant Chief of Naval Staff

AEF American Expeditionary Force

ASW antisubmarine warfare

B BIR Board of Invention and Research

C CNS Chief of Naval Staff

D DCNS Deputy Chief of Naval Staff

DER Department of Experiments and Research

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About the Author

Dr. Breemer is a professor of National Security Decision Making at the Naval War 

lege’s Monterey Program, in Monterey, California. He earned his PhD in internat

relations at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. After a twelve-yea

as a professional defense analyst in the Washington, D.C., area, he joined the Dep

ment of National Security Affairs of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. 

1992, he was appointed a Senior Secretary of the Navy Research Fellow at the Na

War College, Newport, Rhode Island; eight years later, he joined the Naval War C

faculty in Monterey. Dr. Breemer is the author of U.S. Naval Developments (Naut

and Aviation, 1983) and Soviet Submarines: Design, Development, and Tactics (Jan

Information Group, 1989), as well as of numerous journal articles and chapters i

edited collections. He is currently preparing a book manuscript reexamining the

importance of radar in the Battle of Britain.

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The Newport Papers

Piracy and Maritime Crime: Historical and Modern Case Studies, edited by Bruce 

Elleman, Andrew Forbes, and David Rosenberg (no. 35, January 2010).

Somalia . . . From the Sea, by Gary Ohls (no. 34, July 2009).

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents, edited by John B. Hattendor

Peter M. Swartz (no. 33, December 2008).

Major Naval Operations, by Milan Vego (no. 32, September 2008).

Perspectives on Maritime Strategy: Essays from the Americas, edited by Paul D. Tay

(no. 31, August 2008).

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s: Selected Documents, edited by John B. Hattendor

30, September 2007).

Shaping the Security Environment, edited by Derek S. Reveron (no. 29, September 2

Waves of Hope: The U.S. Navy’s Response to the Tsunami in Northern Indonesia, by 

A. Elleman (no. 28, February 2007).

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s: Selected Documents, edited by John B. Hattendor

27, September 2006).

Reposturing the Force: U.S. Overseas Presence in the Twenty-first Century, edited b

Carnes Lord (no. 26, February 2006).

The Regulation of International Coercion: Legal Authorities and Political Constrain

James P. Terry (no. 25, October 2005).

Naval Power in the Twenty-first Century: A Naval War College Review Reader, edi

Peter Dombrowski (no. 24, July 2005).

The Atlantic Crises: Britain, Europe, and Parting from the United States, by William

Hopkinson (no. 23, May 2005).

China’s Nuclear Force Modernization, edited by Lyle J. Goldstein with Andrew S.

Erickson (no. 22, April 2005).

Latin American Security Challenges: A Collaborative Inquiry from North and Sou

edited by Paul D. Taylor (no. 21, 2004).

Global War Game: Second Series, 1984–1988, by Robert Gile (no. 20, 2004).

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(no. 19, 2004).

Military Transformation and the Defense Industry after Next: The Defense Industrial

Implications of Network-Centric Warfare, by Peter J. Dombrowski, Eugene Gholz, and

Andrew L. Ross (no. 18, 2003).

The Limits of Transformation: Officer Attitudes toward the Revolution in Military Affairs,

by Thomas G. Mahnken and James R. FitzSimonds (no. 17, 2003).

The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy’s Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Sub

marines, by Owen R. Cote, Jr. (no. 16, 2003).

International Law and Naval War: The Effect of Marine Safety and Pollution Conventions during International Armed Conflict, by Dr. Sonja Ann Jozef Boelaert-Suominen

(no. 15, December 2000).

Theater Ballistic Missile Defense from the Sea: Issues for the Maritime Component Commander, by Commander Charles C. Swicker, U.S. Navy (no. 14, August 1998).

Sailing New Seas, by Admiral J. Paul Reason, U.S. Navy, with David G. Freymann (no. 13,

March 1998).

What Color Helmet? Reforming Security Council Peacekeeping Mandates, by Myron H.

Nordquist (no. 12, August 1997).

The International Legal Ramifications of United States Counter-Proliferation Strategy:

Problems and Prospects, by Frank Gibson Goldman (no. 11, April 1997).

Chaos Theory: The Essentials for Military Applications, by Major Glenn E. James,

U.S. Air Force (no. 10, October 1996).

A Doctrine Reader: The Navies of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and

Spain, by James J. Tritten and Vice Admiral Luigi Donolo, Italian Navy (Retired) (no. 9

December 1995).

Physics and Metaphysics of Deterrence: The British Approach, by Myron A. Greenberg

(no. 8, December 1994).

Mission in the East: The Building of an Army in a Democracy in the New German States,

by Colonel Mark E. Victorson, U.S. Army (no. 7, June 1994).

The Burden of Trafalgar: Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations on the Eve of

the First World War, by Jan S. Breemer (no. 6, October 1993).

Beyond Mahan: A Proposal for a U.S. Naval Strategy in the Twenty-First Century, by

Colonel Gary W. Anderson, U.S. Marine Corps (no. 5, August 1993).

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The “New” Law of the Sea and the Law of Armed Conflict at Sea, by Horace B.

Robertson, Jr. (no. 3, October 1992).

Toward a Pax Universalis: A Historical Critique of the National Military Strategy for 

1990s, by Lieutenant Colonel Gary W. Anderson, U.S. Marine Corps (no. 2, April 1

“Are We Beasts?” Churchill and the Moral Question of World War II “Area Bombing

Christopher C. Harmon (no. 1, December 1991).

Newport Papers are available online (Acrobat required) at www.usnwc.edu/press

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