THE SUBMARINE

Evening Post, Volume CI, Issue 50, 28 February 1921, Page 2

THE SUBMARINE

1 IS IT TO SURVIVE?

AN ADVERSE VERDICT

"THE LESSON OF THE WAR,"

Many notable naval experts contend— as Sir Percy Scott contended before the Great War —that the capital ship is doomed to disappear before the victorious development of other, smaller craft, especially the submarine and aeroplane. The opposite theory, that the submarine itself is a proved failure, has fewer advocates, but it is interestingly discussed in a recent article by Mr. Archibald Hurd, the Daily Telegraph's diligent contributor on naval subjects.

If we take uS advantage of the recent developments in scientific research and "experiments, writes Mr. Hurd, the submarine will have few terrors for us in the next war, if there is to be a next war. So far as can be seen at present its eventual doom is assured. That is the outstanding lesson of the naval war. Before hostilities ceased naval officers! y°unft and old, a's they confess, regarded the submarine almost with contempt, so little was it feared. That was not the case in merchant ships, but there is a marked distinction between a. wellarmed man-of-war of high speed, whether battleship or battle-cruiser, and an unarmed merchant vessel with one-half or one-third its speed."

What will happen io any submarinecraft of an enemy fleet was illustrated by tie story which was told at the beginning of this month in the Prize Court. Tie motor-boat Salmon was on duty in the North Sea in July, 1916, when Lieutenant F. E. Temple-West, R.N. V.R., heard through his hydrophone the movements of a- submarine submerged. The hydrophone at that date was in its infancy, but the signals which, it gave enabled the Salmon to follow the course of the submarine vessel. After a stern chase the Salmon, travelling on the surface, quickly overtook the German submarine, out of sight down below; and the hydrophone at last told Lieutenant Temple-West that he was right ou top of the enemy craft. He then dropped a serie3 of. depth charges, which, undoubtedly destroyed the vessel, U,C. 7. She had a crew of 18 officers and' men, and they met an indescribable death in these circumstances. Pieces of wood and grating came to the surface, and oil rose for three or four hours, indications, in the .judgment of the President of the Prize Court, Sir Henry Duke, that this vessel had been destroyed. That is an incident which occurred long before the scientist, working in association with the naval officer, had perfected, the hydrophone and other remarkable devices, of which the less said the better. There is now the assurance that if we maintain an adeqiiate.auxiliary fleet.of small craft, suitably equipped for fighting the. submarine, we have little to fear so far as subraersibles are concerned.

TECHNICAL PBOBLBMS.

The nation will have to decide whether it considers that any fleet is necessary, and, if necessary, the question'will arise : How shall it be constituted? The first matter is one {or the taxpayer; the second rests with naval officers, who devote their lives to what is an extremely technical profession, and particularly with naval officers who served at sea during the war, for only they possess full knowledge, and only they can guide public opinion. A parallel illustration may be given. A doctor is asked to diagnose an illness. He decides tha)^ an operation is desirable, and the sufferer then states \»>ethei' he will submit to the ordeal. If his decision is in the affirmative a surgeon is called in to operate. Neither the- doctor noi v the patient is so foolish.as to dictate to the surgeon either how the operation is to be carried out or the character of instruments he shall use. ' ' .

The application of this illustration to the discussion of the relative' merits of tho capital ship and the submarine is apparent. It is for the taxpayers, through Parliament, to say whether or not- they will pay for a Navy; but it is fpr the responsible naval officers, with expert knowledge, which no one outside the Navy can possess, to determine what types of ships shall be built with tho money provided. Those navaJ officers are the Sea Lords supported by the Naval Staff. Public discussion of euch matters within limits is all to the good, in so far as it serves to interest the community in tho problems of naval defence, but naval warfare, it must be borne in mind, is a science—it is as much above the head of the ordinary man as the work of the surgeon, the engineer, or the lawyer. However carefully the civilian may devote himself to questions affecting naval strategy and tactics, he can "never hope to rival the naval officer, with his intimate knowledge of navigation, gunnery, torpedoes, and other aspects of his profession. Those who have time and opportunity can only hope to render .service to the State by canvassing the opinions of the best and most recently informed-members of-this great profession'; who are responsible -for the defence of , British maritime interests ; and then, exercising their judgment and whatever knowledge they may possess," attempt to sift them and correlate them to national policy; and that is where finance and international politics come in. ■

FAILURE OF THE SUBMARINE. A great deal of confusion in the public mind respecting the battleship vis-a-vis the submarine arises from an easily understood misconception as to the course of the war by eea. Why did the enemy resort to the submarine campaign on merchant. shipping ? The answer is a, simple.one. He took this step, which eventually brought America into the war and arrayed most of the neutral nations ■against Germany, because the submarine employed against British men-of-war achieved little or no success. High speed is an antidote to the submarine. Thus it happened that a few 1 slow and old ships, were sunk, but. in every case, if the truth were told, their destruction, which occurred in the early phasg of the war, was due less to the skill of the enemy than to other and various reasons. The Admiralty' of the time had not a correct conception of the menace which the submarine represented at that period. The submarine had only recently made its appearance as an independent force, for before the war these craft were always accompanied by parent ships to "nurse" them. Many naval officers believed they were uhsuited, except in coastal waters, to cany out operations unsupported. The Germans proved that this was a misconception based upon ignorance of the recent evolution of the submarine. Before conviction came to the British-naval authorities the price of ignorance had been paid, and' we lost several vessels of old design, and therefore slow.

On the other hand, the enemy's campaign against, the Grand Fleet failed signally; not a single one of its capital ships was sunk by a submarine during the whole period of four and a. half years. It may be said, and it. has been said, that that immunity was due to tho Grand Fleet being little at sea; that it remained in protected harbours because it was afraid of the enemy's submarines. Some time ago a track chart was pre-

paved of the movements of the Grand Fleet during the war, and by the time the courses had been traced the whole of the upper part of the North Sea had been thickly covered with lines ; the chart, resembled nothing bo mucß as a picture of the work of a very industrious spider. The mileage covered was enormous. I have the figures for the Iron Duke, Lord Jellicoe's ■ Fleet flagship,' during the time he was Commander-iii-Ohiflf—that is from. 4t3i August, 1914, to the close of 1916; in that period she covered 44,680 miles, or a distance almost equivalent to twice the circumference of the world. That calculation takes no account of her courses during •'zigzagging,''tactical exercises, or firing practices, but represents just'her ordinary steaming. The record of the, other capital ships of the Grand Fleet in the same period was at least as remarkable, and for the whole period of the war, four and a half years, I should estimate that each battleship of the Grand Fleet, which served from the opening to the close of the struggle, travelled a distance equivalent to nearly, if not quite, thrice the circumnavigation of the globe. So much for the fear of submarines on the part of the Grand Fleet, in face of the most determined efforts of the ejiemv submersible craft to weaken it. They hung round the bases, Scapa Flow^ Cromarty, and Rosyth, but without success. GERMAN FAITH IN U-BOATS.

The "Germans came to attach so little value to submarines in their legitimate sphere that when they met the Grand Fleet oft' Jutland Admiral "Scheej-'s force was not accompanied by any submarines. ?>y that date it was- evident that the submarine offered little meance to the woll-handled battleship or battle-cruiser. But the enemy had a, superiority of destroyers, also armed'with the torpedo. As Admiral Schsar has stated, 107 torpedoes were fired by these vessels during, the battle under advantageous circumstances: How many were hit? One; and that vessel was the Marlborough, in 3/ battle lina seven and a half miles long. She cot back safely to port, tip much for the value of the torpedo,, ■whether carried by submarine or d«etrojer.

It was in those circumstances that the Germans, .disappointed in ths war of attrition against the Grand Fleet, decided to employ their submarines against us on the trade routes, choosing the more focal points. In initiating this campaign they had every advantage. The merchant vessel, unlike the man-of-war, was then not only unarmed and her crew undisciplined for war, but she was also slow. The average cargo vessel has a speed of from ei?ht to ten knots only— that is about half the speed of a battleship and one-third the speed of a battlecruiser or modern light cruiser. The war had already proved that the .submarine is comparatively useless against the swift vessel, and it-will always suffer, so far as can be seen now, under that disadvantage for reasons which may be explained later. But the immediate point of importance is that the enemy, ignoring international law and the dictates of humanity, had exposed to lvi atta-ck a target which he could not fail to hit somewhere-rabou't 9000 unprotected merchant vessels. That campaign, as we know, was a failure, for it did not bring victory to tho Germans, though the British naval authorities were unready to counter it at once. What happened may be stated in a few lines:—

(1) German submarines sank a great volume of merchant shipping; (2) The British Fleet and its auxiliaries destroyed 203 German., sub--marines. ■ ■-. ■■ ■■•*■•• ~ "/~;■■;;" ~~; ' As the months passed, the Naval Staff, working in association with .the best physical scientists this country has produced, and supported by the splendid courage and resource of -the men at sea. gradually built up and equipped the auxiliary patrol for hunting, the submarina. Slowly but sqrely the ' submarine was driven under the surface, with the result that the enemy decided upon the intensive campaign—in, other words, to use not the gun, but the torpedo, and that without warning. Eventually even the torpedo proved comparatively innocuous owing to the increasing insecurity in which the submarines operated. . The intensive campaign,. Ip other words, was a tribute to' the early success with which the auxiliary patrol adapted itself to this new form of warfare, and it also failed. An effective contrast is provided by the following figures as to the losses of British shipping at the height "of the submarine attack—the second quarter of 1917, when we were unready, and the third quarter of 1918—the losses for October and for Ist to 11th November being appended;— No. of Gri>s3 lives ships, tonnage, lost. Second quarter, ' 1917 •'• 377 1,227,970 1.883 Third quarter, 1918 126 448,029 940 October, 1918 23 54,577 318 Ist Nov. to 11th Nov., 1918 2 10,195 1 DEFEAT OF THE SUBMARINE. Then came the Armistice, just when our measures against the submarine were becoming most effective. The spirit of the German crews had become no broken by their terrible experiences that compulsion had to be employed tc obtain men to serve in submarines,! and it was these compulsory measures and the ♦terror of our connter^offensive which laid the seeds of tho revolt of the German J»avy, to be followed by the Revolution. Jf the armistice had not come when it did Germany would have be«n unable to maintain any submarines at sea. That js not an empty prophepy, but a statement which is borne out by information which is now available in this i country as well as in Germany. The submarine was mastered by the end of the third quarter of 1913; if the war-had been continued the enemy would have been unable to maintain these craft^at sea, so complete was our mastery. Those are .the facts which must be borne in mind when the question as to the relative value of the capital ship find the submarine is discussed.. The Grand Fleet, unweakened by all the enemy's. submarine craft, remained the decisive factor in the war; while the submarine's doom was finally and absolutely .sealed. As Professor W. ;H. Bragg, F.E.S., D.Sc, who took a prominent part in scientific research during the war, stated some months. aj;o, we can now say to other Powers : Build as many aubma rines as you like, and we will destroy them. i

The conclusions reached by ths Board of Admiralty and the Naval* Staff as reflected in their continued faith in the capital ship—to which the First Lord referred in March last—are th<% conclusions of all the officers who held responsible positions a.t sea during the war. Their opinijins are shared by the Admiralties of the United States and Japan, who hay« also had opportunities of studying the mass of information not available to the general public. So far as responsible and informed quarters 1 are concerned, there is no difference of opinion as to the relative' values of thecapital ship and the submarine. On the one hand, those naval officers still believe in the capital ship us the essentinl unit around which naval power 'must be builfc up; and, on the other,, they realise that the designs of battleships and bat-tle-cruisers will undergo radical changes. They are satisfied that no vessel built or building in any r.civy of the world embodies fully the lessons of the tray, butthey believe thnt careful investigation will result in an entirely new type of capital ship which will have little or

nothing to fear from submarine attack. They know, and every naval architect knows, that the submarine is the most vulnerable of all types of men-of-war, and that anything that may be done in the effort to remove its inherent weaknesses will probably ■ merely produce other sources of Aveakness. There is talk of large submersible vessels. That is a possib2ity...But the larger the dimensions the greater the difficulty of navigation, particularly in shallow or narrow water*. Moreover, the submersible power which confers a measure of immunity from attack represents weight, and every ship is a compromise between various ele- , ments of strength. It therefore follows that the submarine must always be weaker in other fighting qualities, including, speed, as compared with the sur-' face ship, with its hydrophone, its depth charges, and other devices for dealing with these hornets of the sea.