SUBMARINE WAR

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1928, Page 2

SUBMARINE WAR

FEARFUL LOSSES INCURRED. BRITISH SEAMEN’S COURAGE. (By a Naval Correspondent in the London Times.) It is one of the peculiarities of the naval war that, whereas the date and the hour of every shot that was fired can bo determined from the records, no examination of documents, however minute and conscientious, will ever fix the date of the great and decisive victory at sea. That victory was the point at which the four years’ battle for the control of communications turned definitely in our favour. Many dates might be . chosen; perhaps the most significant is June 26, 1918 —ten year ago. Two days previously Herr von Kuhlmann had made a speech in the Reiehstag; on Juno 26 his speech was reported in all the daily papers of Europe. Every European citizen who read his morning paper was on that day informed that a German Minister, speaking on behalf of the German Government and its advisers, had announced to Hie German nation and the world at large that no military decision was to be expected during the course of the year. Herr von Kuhlmann made this statement most cautiously, and justified it by a quotation from Clausewitz; but those who heard him grasped its terrible significance. The reporter added the word “sensation,” in brackets, after the statement. It is no wonder that the Reichstag Deputies were moved and troubled. For eighteen months they and the nation at large had been assured in the most solemn fashion,, by the highest naval authorities of the ■ German Empire, that the war would shortly be won at sea. Great Britain I eould not suffer the losses daily in- : flirted upon her merchant, fleet and at the same time feed her population, supply her industries, and support her 1 Allies. Her collapse was certain; the date of that collapse was almost calculable. When Herr von Kuhlmann stated that no decision could be hoped for in the year 1918 he was making no appeal to the German nation to stand firm and continue their resistance; he was announcing the failure and. bankruptcy of a campaign to which " the whole German nation looked for final decisive victory. A FIGHT AGAINST ODDS. This four years’ battle at sea was won by a composite exertion so vast and complicated that it almost escapes analysis. The submarine campaign against commMnicationz began before German submarine commanders were ordered to attack merchant shipping, for their early successes, gained against old cruisers and second-line battleships, practically decided the use to which the German submarine fleet would subsequently be put. The first campaign, which began in 1915, and continued with various vicissitudes on either side ■ until the spring of 1916, was indecisive and uncertain. Its results gave the German submarine authorities a hope that, if all restrictions were removed, they could inflict unendurable losses upon the British Empire. On our side the experience gained gave the: naval authorities an apprehension of coming danger, ami an assurance that the ’merchant service possessed the discipline and fighting spirit of a Guards regiment. One thing was henceforth certain; no British merchant captain would ever refuse to fight against any odds, so long as he had the means of fighting at all. No blows are so hard as those delivered by a peaceful, lawabiding man who has been provoked to anger, and it was the bitter indignation and Hie firm, abiding courage of the merchant service which in a large measure determined the outcome. The final decisive round in the struggle began in February, 1917. The British naval authorities combated the menace by laying an enormous mine-field across the German Bight from Horns Reef to Te-schelling. In addition to this, merchantmen were armed as fast as guns could, be provided, every known device that could be'used against submarines was turned out of our arms factories as quickly as it eould be manufactured, incoming and outgoing merchantmen were given orders to keep to controlled traffic lanes upon which the Toeal patrols were concentrated, hunting flotillas were formed and. given tire sole duty of chasing submarines wherever they were reported,, and mining and netting operations were undertaken along the tracks that U-boats followed in the North Sea. The first counter-attack failed; and when its failure was apparent it was apparent, also, that the Empire and the alliance which depended upon it were on the verge of disaster. In the month of April well over half a million tons of British shipping were lost from all causes; in that same month 881,000 tons of shipping of all flags were sunk at sea. These fearful losses were inflicted mainly in the outer approach routes which lie to the west and northwest of the Great Sole Bank —a vast area of water to which no patrol forces, however numerous, could give adequate protection. THE WINNING MOVE. Towards the end of the month of April, the British naval authorities made a series of decisions which later proved to be the winning moves in the game. They gave orders that all ocean traffic to the British Islands was to be given armed escort as soon as the arrangements could be made. The merchantmen were to be assembled in groups at specified ports of assembly; they were to be escorted by a cruiser or an armed escort ship to the zone where submarines might be encountered. Here they were to be met by an escort of destroyers and sloops and conducted to a point of dispersal. The decision was one of the boldest ever made in war, for it was a decision to bring all ocean traffic under ine central control. If that control failed, not by any fault of those who organised it, but simply because, the object to be controlled was too vast to be made subject to one directing mechanism, then, not only -was disaster certain, its scale wag multiplied by thousands; and, if the decision was bold, its execution was so difficult as to seem almost impossible. The naval authorities were ordered to create ex nihilo a maritime railway system over the whole Atlantic, to adjust its workings and its timetables to the same degree of precision as an ordered system of land traffic. They did what was required, with notable results.

During the three months preceding the introduction of the convoy system, 1,212,246 tons of British shipping were lost at sea; during the last three months of the year, this figure had been reduced to the neighbourhood of 700,000; and the eurvo of destruction was falling rapidly. Th© shipbuilding authorities were able to say with certainty that

in a foreseeable time our skipping replacements would exceed our losses. This, indeed, was the position in about May of the following year. But, although .the convoy system was in a sense the decisive manoeuvre in the struggle at sea, it cannot be said to have been the single source of final victory, Each item in the great counterattack upon the U-boats, though disappointing in itself, contained a residue of success. In the end the mine girdle round the. Heligoland Bight compelled the U-boat to enter the North Sea by the longer Baltic route, and this shortened the period of active cruising < i every German by four davs. The deep minefields in the Straits of Dover caused a steady monthly loss to the German submarine fleet, and a proportionate alleviation to shipping in the Channel; the hunting flotillas reduced destruction by compelling every submarine they located to spend hours in flight or inactivity which could have been spent in sinking shipping. The destructive power of each submarine was, in fact, reduced by a complex of measures in which all our maritime resources were expended. German naval officers have explained away the failure of the submarine campaign by reproaches against the political leaders; and it has been left to a German statesman, to explain it justly. “To believe that the submarine campaign would have been successful if it had been begun earlier,” (vrote Bethmann-Hollweg, “is to undervalue Bi-itish tenacity and knowledge of sea warfare.” The last six words of the sentence were well chosen;, they describe in a collective phrase all the component forces of the great exertion at sea—the unbreakable courage of our seamen, their unrivalled »kiH in handling their ships, their power of improvisation, their patience in suffering; the knowledge of our shipbuilders, and the quality of our ships. It was these human qualities, and the things that they create, which "lined the victory and made it complete.