A U-Boat Gallery:
Submarine Warfare in WWI
SMS U-9, one of the old kerosene-burners which gave the British a false sense of security at the War's start because they traveled under a tall column of oily exhaust when surfaced, and so were easily detected. Built in 1910, the 188-foot sub displaced 493 tons surface, 611 submerged, and packed four 45-cm torpedo tubes. At the start of the War, Germany had only 35 U-boats ready for sea and regarded submarines as a novelty without much strategic importance.
On September 22, 1914, U-9 under the command of Otto Weddigen torpedoed and sank three elderly Bacchante-class cruisers off Holland, with a loss of 1,459 British lives; above, the Aboukir capsizes while HMS Cressy stops and lowers boats to pick up survivors, making herself a perfect target for the lurking sub. Capt. Drummond of Aboukir thought he had struck a mine.
U-14 was originally commanded by Korvettenkapitän Walther Schweiger, who later became famous for torpedoing the Lusitania. The sub made 2 wartime patrols, sinking 2 Allied vessels, before meeting her nemesis. Gunfire from the armed trawler Oceanic II sent her to the bottom off Peterhead with the loss of one crewman on June 5, 1915. U-14's 27 remaining submariners became guests of His Britannic Majesty for the duration.
Type UC sub, a small (168-ton) German vessel designed for minelaying, after surrendering to the British at Harwich under the 1918 Armistice. These ships carried no torpedo tubes, but rather 6 chutes for dropping their mines. They were designed to be taken apart and shipped to their destination by rail, then reassembled for service. Evidently this one was employed to mine the English Channel and harbor approaches. The French, British and Russians also developed minelaying subs.
Bow torpedo room in a U-boat. The two torpedo turbes lie beyond the breech-lock wheels, from which the 'fish' were launched by compressed air.
Shortly after the Dogger Bank battle, the Germans launched an all-out U-boat offensive with little regard for neutral shipping or lives. The results were alarming, with one outrage piled on top of another, and Teddy Roosevelt leading the clamor for war. By midyear the Wilson administration was engaged in white-knuckle negotiations with Germany. After months of deadlock, the Kaiser backed down and promised to respect neutral rights. He kept his promise -- for just over one year.
One of the most audacious events of WWI was the transatlantic submarine voyaging of the German merchant submarine Deutschland, which made several trips to the U.S. to wipe the eye of the Royal Navy. Equally stunning was the visit of the U-53, a new German vessel with its ballast tanks modified to accept extra diesel fuel. It surfaced one October afternoon in 1916 at Newport, R.I., where its commander paid his compliments to the USN Commandant and calmly picked up the local papers. A train of curious naval officers, journalists, and photographers accompanied him aboard the U-53 for a tour of the vessel's appointments; then, scrupulously observing the protocol for a belligerent visiting a neutral port, Capt. Hans Rose upped anchor and motored to the vicinity of the Nantucket Lightship. Hovering just in international waters, he began picking off the ships he had identified in the shipping news of the papers he had purchased in Newport: by day's end he had despatched 7. Though no lives were lost, the episode inspired helpless outrage in Americans and rage among the British -- rage largely directed at the Americans, whose destroyers picked up the lifeboats but failed to interfere with the sub's grisly operations.
On the morning of May 7, 1915 the Cunard liner Lusitania arrived unescorted in the Irish Sea after crossing from New York, and fell victim to a single torpedo from U-20.torpedoed off the coast of Ireland at the end of a crossing from New York. there were taut nerves aboard as the ship entered the war zone. Proceeding at a leisurely 15 knots (half her top speed) the great liner steered a straight course despite Admiralty warnings of submarine activity in the area, her captain intent on getting his bearings to fix his position. The torpedo struck just abaft the starboard bridge; its detonation was immediately followed by a massive internal explosion which sank her in less than 20 minutes. The fatal blow is thought by Robert Ballard to be ignition of coal dust in a nearly-empty fuel bunker, blowing out the ship's bottom around Frames 230-245.
Undoubtably the most infamous U-boat kill of WWI: the Lusitania in her death throes off Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland. Inrushing seawater was trapped on the starboard side by the longitudinal bulkheads, giving the ship a heinous list that made it virtually impossible to launch boats successfully. 1,201 died in the catastrophe, including 126 Americans. The atrocity did not bring America immediately into war, but it and other sinkings of neutral vessels created ill-will toward Germany in the States. This and other evidences of German bad faith were important components in the decision to join the war on the Kaiser 2 years later. The paint scheme shown here is correct: the ship's funnels were painted all black and her name painted out for her wartime crossings. Top painting shows the "Lucy" in her peacetime colours.
Prior to the Lusitania Affair, U-boat skippers had mostly observed the Cruiser Rules, allowing crews and passengers of their victims to escape and often sinking their ships by gunfire to save precious torpedoes. As the War ground on, unrestricted sub warfare became a hot political issue in Germany, holding out hope of strangling Britain's trade and forcing an end to the slaughter on the Western Front; it was believed that England could be starved out in 6 months. Despite the danger of antagonizing the U.S., the Kaiser authorized the U-boat campaign in early 1917, and his beefed-up underwater fleet responded with savagery. Surprise torpedo attacks on merchant ships became the norm. People are still escaping as this steamer upends (note man sliding down a line from the stern.)
Often the only warning before a U-boat attack was the "feather" or foam track of a curious periscope, followed by the bubbling track of a torpedo. This was also the only obvious reference antisubmarine vessels had for targeting their invisible foe. In the last year of the War, American researchers devised a crude underwater listening device, the hydrophone. By using triangulation between signal from 3 sub chasers, they could determine a target area to dump their depth charges with high accuracy.
Depth charges in racks on ELCO sub chasers at Harwich, 1917. Metal barrels filled with 300 lbs of TNT (136 kg) detonated by a hydrostatic pistol, depth charges were developed as a desperation measure at the end of 1916 -- a crude, inaccurate, but terrifying weapon. Refined and manufactured in truly overwhelming quantities in the U.S., "ash cans" were the main weapon to force a submarine to surface in WWI. Improved by combination with automated delivery equipment, they proved one leg of an effective anti-submarine arsenal in WWII.
HMS Tempest drops depth charges on a U-boat in 1917. Though actual hits were rare, a near miss could crack the sub's pressure hull or cause other fatal damage.
Originally developed to screen the battleship fleet from torpedo attack, the swift destroyer became the principal antisubmarine weapon. Defender was a smallish British destroyer, built in 1908, 242 feet long, displacing 720 tons. She was armed with three 4" guns and 7 torpedo tubes. As the war developed and the submarine threat became one of the destroyers' principal duties, swarms of larger and more robust vessels were built and deployed.
Here was the true solution to the submarine campaign in two hard-fought wars: protecting trade by traveling in escorted convoys. The system emptied the seas of stray prey and denied U-boats easy pickings. It also held out hope of prompt rescue to torpedoed seamen. With the greater availability and better organization of escort craft from late 1917 on and the weakening grip of the German war effort, the U-boats were finally beaten in the final year of the War. As submarine raids became virtual suicide missions and the impending defeat of the Fatherland loomed, morale in the U-boat fleet plummeted; even as morale in the Allied service strengthened.
The American approach to destroyer design is profiled clearly in this Wickes class four-piper. Seen here at a naval review (the smoke is from salutes being fired), USS Roper was a 314-foot/96 m, flush-decked warship armed with four 4" guns, a very heavy torpedo armament of twelve 21" tubes (6 on each broadside), and 2 depth charge racks. The 111 Wickes class vessels, built in 1917, weighed in at 1,090 tons standard and could develop a top speed of 35-kts.
A new form of antisubmarine vessel was the sub chaser -- fast, wooden-hulled, gasoline-powered craft for coastal convoy work, mounting machine guns and depth charges. The predominant type in the first phase of the War was the 80-foot (24½ m) ELCO, manufactured in New Jersey for Britain. Here is one of the ELCO boats operated by the Royal Navy, skimming along at speed.
Even before the April 1917 declaration of war, the United States marshaled its immense industrial capacity on behalf of the Allies; and after war was declared, the country was whipped into a patriotic frenzy of production in an all-out push for victory.
When there was insufficient steel for all-out production, the U.S. built ships of concrete and -- wood. Lots of them. When the U.S. Navy developed a beefier sub chaser, the 110-foot (33½ m) Standard SC, it was built of wood in multitudes of small private yards. The SC featured a midships cabin behind the bridgehouse, (3) Standard Motor Co. gasoline engines developing 19 kts., and standard armament of a 3" (76 mm) gun for'ard, (2) 30mm machine guns at the bridge, and a Y gun and 2 depth charge racks aft. They were used as escorts close to shore and on special antisubmarine warfare assignments. Here are two of the 440 SCs made, under construction in New York City. Note the large German liner in the background -- undoubtedly undergoing conversion to a troopship.
A sub chaser in action: the U.S. SSC boat IX4 (SC-224) romping through the waters where the Ionic meets the Adriatic. Constructed of unseasoned 1-5/8" (41.4 mm) longleaf pine planks at a yacht builder's on Lake Erie, the 50-ton chaser had an unusual story. After crossing with her mates in a convoy from Bermuda, one of IX4's engines blew on the last leg into Malta. In the Royal Dockyard, her Chief dismounted the blown engine and hoisted it ashore, and then moved the center engine into its place. A spare, larger set of propellers came from the mother ship's stores and the center screw was removed; enthusiastic help came from the dockyard geeks. When the crew trialed the boat, they found she was just as fast as before and with 50% increased range, making her the utility boat for operations requiring special endurance. She was assigned to the Otranto Barrage deployed between Italy and Greece along with several squadrons of American boats. Sub chasers specialized in killing returning submarines which had little or no sting left and whose crews might be fatigued and sloppy at the end of a mission. Chasers worked in teams of 3 boats, determining a sub's location by triangulating its audio signature as heard from their 3 different sets of hydrophones. The chasers would then depth-charge the indicated area intensely. This method racked up an impressive record of kills compared to the undirected depth-charging routines followed earlier in the War. The sub chasers' exploits in the Second Battle of Durazzo (Oct. 2, 1918) were recorded in Milholland's 1936 book The Splinter Fleet of the Otranto Barrage. The invention of hydrophones became the basis for the development of sonar, used in ASW since WWII.
Germany too marshaled its technological genius to support the submarine campaign. Here is the SMS Vulkan, sub tender for the North Sea U-boat fleet. In effect she was a mobile floating drydock, capable of servicing two full-size U-boats side by side.
The principal German submarine bases were on the English Channel coast of occupied Belgium at Ostend, Bruges, and Zeebrugge (Ostend and Zeebrugge being the two outlets of the Bruges Canal). Here are the Zeebrugge "sub pens" -- berths for the U-boats within a hardened concrete structure. The hard shell protected boats and crews from bombardment by British monitors or aircraft.