The Victory at Sea: History of the Naval Combat in WW1 - William Sowden Sims

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of releasing those destroyers, or a part of them, for the anti-submarine campaign; yet they always decided, and they decided wisely, against any such hazardous division. At that time the German dreadnought fleet was not immeasurably inferior in numbers to the British; it had a protecting screen of about 100 destroyers; and it would have been madness for the British to have gone into battle with its own destroyer screen placed several hundred miles away, off the coast of Ireland. I lay stress upon this circumstance because I find that in America the British Admiralty has been criticized for keeping a large destroyer force with the Grand Fleet, instead of detaching them for battle with the submarine. I think that I have made clear that this criticism is based upon a misconception of the whole naval campaign. Without this destroyer screen the British Grand Fleet might have been destroyed by the Germans; if the Grand Fleet had been destroyed, the war would have ended in the defeat of the Allies; not to have maintained these destroyers in northern waters would thus have amounted simply to betraying the cause of civilization and to making Germany a free gift of victory.

      Germany likewise practically immobilized a considerable number of British destroyers by attacking hospital ships. When the news of such dastardly attacks became known, it was impossible for Americans and Englishmen to believe at first that they were intentional; they so callously violated all the rules of warfare and all the agreements for lessening the horrors of war to which Germany herself had become a party that there was a tendency in both enlightened countries to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. As a matter of fact, not only were the submarine attacks on hospital ships deliberate, but Germany had officially informed us that they would be made! The reasons for this warning are clear enough; again, the all-important rôle which the destroyers were playing in anti-submarine warfare was the point at issue. Until we received such warning, hospital ships had put to sea unescorted by warships, depending for their safety upon the rules of the Hague Conference. Germany attacked these ships in order to make us escort them with destroyers, and thereby compel us to divert these destroyers from the anti-submarine campaign. And, of course, England was forced to acquiesce in this German programme. Had the Anglo-Saxon mind resembled the Germanic in all probability we should have accepted the logic of the situation; we should have refused to be diverted from the great strategic purpose which meant winning the war—that is, protecting merchant shipping; in other words, we should have left the hospital ships to their fate, and justified ourselves and stilled our consciences by the principle of the greater good. But the British and the American minds do not operate that way; it was impossible for us to leave sick and wounded men as prey to submarines. Therefore, after receiving the German warning, backed up, as it was, by the actual destruction of unprotected hospital ships, we began providing them with destroyer escorts. This greatly embarrassed us in the anti-submarine campaign, for at times, especially during the big drives, we had a large number of hospital ships to protect. As soon as we adopted this policy, Germany, having attained her end, which was to keep the destroyers out of the submarine area, stopped attacking sick and wounded soldiers. Yet we still were forced to provide these unfortunates with destroyer escorts, for, had we momentarily withdrawn these protectors, the German submarines would immediately have renewed their attacks on hospital ships.

      Not only was the British navy at that time safeguarding the liberties of mankind at sea, but its army in France was doing its share in safeguarding them on land. And the fact that Britain had to support this mighty army had its part in making British shipping at times almost an easy prey for the German submarines. For next in importance to maintaining the British Grand Fleet intact it was necessary to keep secure the channel crossing. Over this little strip of water were transported the men and the supplies from England to France that kept the German army at bay; to have suspended these communications, even for a brief period, would have meant that the Germans would have captured Paris, overrun the whole of France, and ended the war, at least the war on land. In the course of four years Great Britain transported about 20,000,000 people across the Channel without the loss of a single soul. She accomplished this only by constantly using many destroyers and other light surface craft as escorts for the transports. But this was not the only responsibility of the kind that rested on the overburdened British shoulders. There was another part of the seas in which, for practical and political reasons, the British destroyer fleet had to do protective duty. In the Mediterranean lay not only the trade routes to the East, but also the lines of supply which extended to Italy, to Egypt, to Palestine, and to Mesopotamia. If Germany could have cut off Italy's food and materials Italy would have been forced to withdraw from the war. The German and Austrian submarines, escaping from Austria's Adriatic ports, were constantly assailing this commerce, attempting to do this very thing. Moreover, the success of the German submarine campaign in these waters would have compelled the Allies to abandon the Salonika expedition, which would have left the Central Powers absolute masters of the Balkans and the Middle East. For these reasons it was necessary to maintain a considerable force of destroyers in the Mediterranean.

      For the British navy it was therefore a matter of choice what areas she would attempt to protect with her destroyer forces; the one thing that was painfully apparent was that she could not satisfactorily safeguard all the danger zones. With the inadequate force at her disposal it was inevitable that certain areas should be left relatively open to the U-boats; and the decision as to which ones these should be was simply a matter of balancing the several conflicting interests. In April, 1917, the Admiralty had decided to give the preference to the Grand Fleet, the hospital ships, the Channel crossing, and the Mediterranean, practically in the order mentioned. It is evident from these facts that nearly the entire destroyer fleet must have been disposed in these areas. This decision, all things considered, was the only one that was possible; yet, after placing the destroyers in these selected areas, the great zone of trans-Atlantic shipping, west and south of Ireland, vitally important as it was, was necessarily left inadequately protected. So desperate was the situation that sometimes only four or five British destroyers were operating in this great stretch of waters; and I do not think that the number ever exceeded fifteen. Inasmuch as that represented about the number of German submarines in this same area, the situation may strike the layman as not particularly desperate. But any such basis of comparison is absurd. The destroyers were operating on the surface in full view of the submarines; the submarines could submerge at any time and make themselves invisible; and herein we have the reason why the contest was so markedly unequal. But aside from all other considerations, the method of warfare adopted by the Allies against the U-boat was necessarily ineffective, but was the best that could be used until sufficient destroyers became available to convoy shipping. The so-called submarine patrol, under the circumstances which prevailed at that time, could accomplish very little. This little fleet of destroyers was based on Queenstown; from this port they put forth and patrolled the English Channel and the waters about Ireland in the hope that a German submarine would stick its nose above the waves. The central idea of the destroyer patrol was this one of hunting; the destroyer could have sunk any submarine or driven it away from shipping if the submarine would only have made its presence known. But of course this was precisely what the submarine declined to do. It must be evident to the merest novice that four or five destroyers, rushing around hunting for submarines which were lying a hundred feet or so under water, could accomplish very little. The under-water boat could always see its surface enemy long before it was itself seen and thus could save its life by the simple process of submerging. It must also be clear that the destroyer patrol could accomplish much only in case there were a very large number of destroyers. We figured that, to make the patrol system work with complete success, it would be necessary to have one destroyer for every square mile. The area of the destroyer patrol off Queenstown comprised about 25,000 square miles; it is apparent that the complete protection of the trans-Atlantic trade routes would have taken about 25,000 destroyers. And the British, as I have said, had available anywhere from four to fifteen in this area.

      The destroyer flotilla being so small, it is not surprising that the German submarines were making ducks and drakes of it. The map of the sinkings which took place in April brings out an interesting fact: numerous as these sinkings were, very few merchantmen were torpedoed, in this month, at the entrance to the Irish Sea or in the English Channel. These were the narrow waters where shipping was massed and where the little destroyer patrol was intended to operate. The German submarines apparently avoided these waters, and made their attacks out in the open sea, sometimes two and three hundred miles west and south of Ireland. Their purpose in doing this was to draw

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