Having constantly before my eyes this picture of the Grand Fleet immune from torpedo attack, naturally the first question I asked, when discussing the situation with Admiral Jellicoe and others, was this: "Why not apply this same principle to merchant ships?"
If destroyers could keep the submarines away from battleships, they could certainly keep them away from merchantmen. It is clear, from the description already given, precisely how the battleships had been made safe from submarines; they had proceeded, as usual, in a close formation, or "convoy," and their destroyer screen had proved effective.
Thus logic apparently indicated that the convoy system was the "answer"
to the submarine.
Yet the convoy, as used in previous wars, differed materially from any application of the idea which could possibly be made to the present contest. This scheme of sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself. As early as the thirteenth century, the merchants of the Hanseatic League were compelled to sail their ships in convoy as a protection against the pirates who were then constantly lurking in the Baltic Sea. The Government of Venice used this same device to protect its enormous commerce. In the fifteenth century the large trade in wool and wine which existed between England and the Moorish ports of Spain was safeguarded by convoys, and in the sixteenth century Spain herself regularly depended upon ma.s.sing her ships to defend her commerce with the West Indies against the piratical attacks of English and French adventurers. The escorts provided for these "flotas" really laid the foundation of the mighty Spanish fleet which threatened England"s existence for more than a hundred years. By the time of Queen Elizabeth the convoy had thus become the all-prevailing method of safeguarding merchant shipping, but it was in the Napoleonic wars that it had reached its greatest usefulness. The convoys of that period were managed with some military precision; there were carefully stipulated methods of collecting the ships, of meeting the cruiser escorts at the appointed rendezvous, and of dispersing them when the danger zone was pa.s.sed; and naval officers were systematically put in charge. The convoys of this period were very large; from 200 to 300 ships were not an unusual gathering, and sometimes 500 or more would get together at certain important places, such as the entrance to the Baltic. But these ships, of course, were very small compared with those of the present time. It was only necessary to supply such aggregations of vessels with enough protecting cruisers to overwhelm any raiders which the enemy might send against them. The merchantmen were not required to sail in any particular formation, nor were they required to manoeuvre against unseen mysterious foes. Neither was it absolutely essential that they should keep constantly together; and they could even spread themselves somewhat loosely over the ocean. If an enemy raider appeared on the horizon, the escorting cruiser or cruisers left the convoy and began chase; a battle ensued, the convoy meanwhile pa.s.sing on its voyage unharmed. When its protecting vessels had disposed of the attackers, they rejoined the merchantmen. No unusual seamanship was demanded of the merchant captains, for the whole responsibility for their safety rested with the escorting cruisers.
But the operation of beating off an occasional surface raider, which necessarily fights in the open, is quite a different procedure from that of protecting an aggregation of vessels from enemies that discharge torpedoes under the water. As part protection against such insidious attacks both the merchant ships and the escorting men-of-war of to-day had in this war to keep up a perpetual zigzagging. This zigzag, indeed, was in itself an efficacious method of protection. As already said, the submarine was forced to attain an advantageous position before it could discharge its torpedo; it was its favourite practice to approach to within a few hundred yards in order to hit its victim in a vital spot.
This mere fact shows that zigzagging in itself was one of the best methods of avoiding destruction. Before this became the general rule, the task of torpedoing a vessel was comparatively easy. All it was necessary for the submarine to do was to bring the vessel"s masts in line; that is, to get directly ahead of her, submerge with the small periscope showing only occasionally, and to fire the torpedo at short range as the ship pa.s.sed by. Except in the case of very slow vessels, she could of course do this only when she was not far from the course of her advancing prey when she first sighted her. If, however, the vessel was zigzagging, this pretty game was usually defeated; the submarine never knew in what direction to go in order to get within torpedoing distance, and she could not go far because her speed under water is so slow. The same conditions apply to a zigzagging convoy. This explained why, as soon as the merchant vessel or convoy entered the submarine zone, or as soon as a submarine was sighted, it began zigzagging, first on one side and then on the other, and always irregularly, its course comprising a disjointed line, which made it a mere chance whether the submarine could get into a position from which to fire with any certainty of obtaining results. A vessel sailing alone could manoeuvre in this way without much difficulty, but it is apparent that twenty or thirty vessels, sailing in close formation, would not find the operation a simple one. It was necessary for them to sail in close and regular formation in order to make it possible to manoeuvre them and screen them with destroyers, so it is evident that the closer the formation the fewer the destroyers that would be needed to protect it. These circ.u.mstances make the modern convoy quite a different affair from the happy-go-lucky proceeding of the Napoleonic era.
It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest hostility to the convoys has always come from the merchant captains themselves. In old days they chafed at the time which was consumed in a.s.sembling the ships, at the necessity for reducing speed to enable the slower vessels to keep up with the procession, and at the delay in getting their cargoes into port. In all wars in which convoys have been used it has been very difficult to keep the merchant captains in line. In Nelson"s day these fine old salts were constantly breaking away from their convoys and taking their chances of running into port unescorted. If the merchant master of a century ago rebelled at the comparatively simply managed convoy of those days it is not strange that their successors of the present time should not have looked with favour upon the relatively complicated and difficult arrangement required of them in this war. In the early discussions with these men at the Admiralty they showed themselves almost unanimously opposed to the convoy.
"The merchantmen themselves are the chief obstacle to the convoy," said Admiral Jellicoe. "We have discussed it with them many times and they declare that it is impossible. It is all right for war vessels to manoeuvre in close formation, they say, for we spend our time practising in these formations, and so they think that it is second nature to us. But they say that they cannot do it. They particularly reject the idea that when in formation they can manoeuvre their ships in the fog or at night without lights. They believe that they would lose more ships through collisions than the submarines would sink."
I was told that the whole subject had been completely threshed out at a meeting which had been held at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, about six weeks before America had entered the war. At that time ten masters of merchant ships had met Admiral Jellicoe and other members of the Admiralty and had discussed the convoy proposition at length. In laying the matter before these experienced seamen Admiral Jellicoe emphasized the necessity of good station-keeping, and he described the close formation which the vessels would have to maintain. It would be necessary for the ships to keep together, he explained, otherwise the submarines could pick off the stragglers. He asked the masters whether eight merchant ships, which had a speed varying perhaps two knots, could keep station in line ahead (that is, in single file or column) 500 yards apart, and sail in two columns down the Channel.
"It would be absolutely impossible," the ten masters replied, almost in a chorus.
A discouraging fact, they said, was that many of the ablest merchant captains had gone into the navy, and that many of those who had replaced them could not be depended on to handle their ships in such a formation.
"We have so few competent deck officers that the captain would have to be on the bridge the whole twenty-four hours," they said. And the difficulty was not only with the bridge, but with the engine-room. In order to keep the ships constantly the same distance apart it would be necessary accurately to regulate their speed; the battleships could do this because they had certain elaborate devices, which the merchant vessels lacked, for timing the revolutions of the engines. The poor quality of the coal which they were obtaining would also make it difficult to maintain a regular speed.
Admiral Jellicoe then asked the masters whether they could sail in twos or threes and keep station.
"Two might do it, but three would be too many," was the discouraging verdict. But the masters were positive that even two merchantmen could not safely keep station abreast in the night-time without lights; two such vessels would have to sail in single file, the leading ship showing a stern light. The masters emphasized their conviction that they preferred to sail alone, each ship for herself, and to let each one take her chances of getting into port.
And there the matter rested. I had the opportunity of discussing the convoy system with several merchant captains, and in these discussions they simply echoed the views which had been expressed at this formal conference. I do not believe that British naval officers came in contact with a single merchant master who favoured the convoy at that time. They were not doubtful about the idea; they were openly hostile. The British merchant captains are a magnificent body of seamen; their first thought was to serve their country and the Allied cause; their att.i.tude in this matter was not obstinacy; it simply resulted from their sincere conviction that the convoy system would entail greater shipping losses than were then being inflicted by the German submarines.
Many naval officers at that time shared the same view. They opposed the convoy not only on these grounds; its introduction would mean immediately cutting down the tonnage 15 or 20 per cent., because of the time which would be consumed in a.s.sembling the ships and awaiting escorts and in the slower average speed which they could make. Many ship owners and directors of steamship companies expressed the same opinions.
They also objected to the convoy on the ground that it would cause considerable delay and hence would result in loss of earnings. Yet the att.i.tude of the merchant marine had not entirely eliminated the convoy from consideration. At the time when I arrived the proposal was still being discussed; the rate at which the Germans were sinking merchantmen made this inevitable. And there seemed to be two schools among Allied naval men, one of which was opposed to the convoy, while the other insisted that it should be given a trial. The convoy had one irresistible attraction for the officer which seemed to counterbalance all the objections which were being urged against it. Its adoption would mean taking the offensive against the German submarines. The essential defect of the patrol system, as it was then conducted, was that it was primarily a defensive measure. Each destroyer cruised around in an a.s.signed area, ready to a.s.sist vessels in distress, escort ships through her own "square" and, incidentally, to attack a submarine when the opportunity was presented. But the mere fact that a destroyer was patrolling a particular area meant only, as already explained, that the submarine had occasionally to sink out of sight until she had pa.s.sed by.
Consequently the submarine proceeded to operate whenever a destroyer was not in sight, and this was necessarily most of the time, for the submarine zone was such a big place and the Allied destroyer fleet was so pitifully small that it was impossible to cover it effectively. Under these conditions there were very few encounters between destroyers and submarines, at least in the waters south and west of Ireland, for the submarines took all precautions against getting close enough to be sighted by the destroyers.
But the British and French navies were not the only ones which, at this time, were depending upon the patrol as a protection against the subsurface boat. The American navy was committing precisely the same error off our Atlantic coast. As soon as Congress declared war against Germany we expected that at least a few of the U-boats would cross the Atlantic and attack American shipping; indeed, many believed that some had already crossed in antic.i.p.ation of war; the papers were filled with silly stories about "submarine bases" in Mexican waters, on the New England coast, and elsewhere; submarines were even reported entering Long Island Sound; nets were stretched across the Narrows to keep them out of New York Harbour; and our coasting vessels saw periscopes and the wakes of torpedoes everywhere from Maine to Florida. So prevalent was this apprehension that, in the early days of the war, American destroyers regularly patrolled our coast looking for these far-flung submarines. Yet the idea of seeking them this way was absurd. Even had we known where the submarine was located there would have been little likelihood that we could ever have sighted it, to say nothing of getting near it. We might have learned that a German U-boat was operating off Cape Cod; we might have had the exact lat.i.tude and longitude of the location which it was expected that it would reach at a particular moment. At the time the message was sent the submarine might have been lying on the surface ready to attack a pa.s.sing merchantman, but even under these conditions the destroyer could never have reached her quarry, for as soon as the U-boat saw the enemy approaching it would simply have ducked under the water and remained there in perfect safety.
When all danger had pa.s.sed it would again have bobbed up to the surface as serenely as you please, and gone ahead with its appointed task of sinking merchant ships. One of the astonishing things about this war was that many of the naval officers of all countries did not seem to understand until a very late date that it was utterly futile to send anti-submarine surface craft out into the wide ocean to attack or chase away submarines. The thing to do, of course, was to make the submarines come to the anti-submarine craft and fight in order to get merchantmen.
I have made this point before, and I now repeat the explanation to emphasize that the patrol system was necessarily unsuccessful, because it made almost impossible any combats with submarines and afforded very little protection to shipping. The advantage of the convoy system, as its advocates now urged, was precisely that it made such combats inevitable. In other words, it meant offensive warfare. It was proposed to surround each convoy with a protecting screen of destroyers in precisely the same way that the battle fleet was protected. Thus we should compel any submarine which was planning to torpedo a convoyed ship to do so only in waters that were infested with destroyers. In order to get into position to discharge its missile the submarine would have to creep up close to the rim that marked the circle of these destroyers. Just as soon as the torpedo started on its course and the tell-tale wake appeared on the surface the protecting ships would immediately begin sowing the waters with their depth charges. Thus in the future the Germans would be compelled to fight for every ship which they should attempt to sink, instead of sinking them conveniently in waters that were free of destroyers, as had hitherto been their privilege. Already the British had demonstrated that such a screen of destroyers could protect merchant ships as well as war vessels. They were making this fact clear every day in the successful transportation of troops and supplies across the Channel. In this region they had established an immune zone, which was constantly patrolled by destroyers and other anti-submarine craft, and through these the merchant fleets were constantly pa.s.sing with complete safety. The proposal to convoy all merchant ships was a proposal to apply this same system on a much broader scale. If we should arrange our ships in compact convoys and protect them with destroyers we would really create another immune zone of this kind, and this would be different from the one established across the Channel only in that it would be a movable one. In this way we should establish about a square mile of the surface of the ocean in which submarines could not operate without great danger, and then we could move that square mile along until port was reached.
The advantages of the convoy were thus so apparent that, despite the pessimistic att.i.tude of the merchant captains, there were a number of officers in the British navy who kept insisting that it should be tried.
In this discussion I took my stand emphatically with these officers.
From the beginning I had believed in this method of combating the U-boat warfare. Certain early experiences had led me to believe that the merchant captains were wrong in underestimating the quality of their own seamanship. It was my conviction that these intelligent and hardy men did not really know how capable they were at handling ships. In my discussions with them they disclosed an exaggerated idea of the seamanly ability of naval officers in manoeuvring their large fleets. They attributed this to the superior training of the men and to the special manoeuvring qualities of the ship. "Warships are built so that they can keep station, and turn at any angle at a moment"s notice," they would say, "but we haven"t any men on our ships who can do these things." As a matter of fact, these men were entirely in error and I knew it. Their practical experience in handling ships of all sizes, shapes, and speeds under a great variety of conditions is in reality much more extensive than naval officers can possibly enjoy. I learned this more than thirty years ago, when stationed on the Pennsylvania schoolship, teaching the boys navigation. This was one of the most valuable experiences of my life, for it brought me in every-day contact with merchant seamen, and it was then that I made the discovery which proved so valuable to me now.
It is true that merchant captains had much to learn about steaming and manoeuvring in formation, but I was sure they could pick it up quickly and carry it out successfully under the direction of naval officers--the convoy commander being always a naval officer.
The naval officer not only has a group of vessels that are practically uniform in speed and ability to turn around quickly, but he is provided also with various instruments which enable him to keep the revolutions of his engines constant, to measure distances and the like. Moreover, as a junior officer, he is schooled in manoeuvring these very ships for some years before he is trusted with the command of one of them, and he, therefore, not only knows their peculiarities, but also those of their captains--the latter very useful information, by the way.
Though it was necessary for the merchantmen, on the other hand, to bring their much clumsier ships into formation with perhaps thirty entirely strange vessels of different sizes, shapes, speeds, nationalities, and manoeuvring qualities, yet I was confident that they were competent to handle them successfully under these difficult conditions. Indeed, afterward, one of my most experienced destroyer commanders reported that while he was escorting a convoy of twenty-eight ships they kept their stations quite as well as battleships, while they were executing two manoeuvres to avoid a submarine.
Such influence as I possessed at this time, therefore, I threw in with the group of British officers which was advocating the convoy.
There was, however, still one really serious impediment to adopting this convoy system, and that was that the number of destroyers available was insufficient. The British, for reasons which have been explained, did not have the necessary destroyers for this work, and this was what made so very important the partic.i.p.ation of the United States in the naval war--for our navy possessed the additional vessels that would make possible the immediate adoption of the convoy system. I do not wish to say that the convoy would not have been established had we not sent destroyers for that purpose, yet I do not see how otherwise it could have been established in any complete and systematic way at such an early date. And we furnished other ships than destroyers, for besides providing what I have called the modern convoy--that which protects the compact ma.s.s of vessels from submarines--it was necessary also to furnish escorts after the old Napoleonic plan. It was the business of the destroyers to conduct the merchantmen only through the submarine zone. They did not take them the whole distance across the ocean, for there was little danger of submarine attack until the ships had arrived in the infested waters. This would have been impossible in any case with the limited number of destroyers. But from the time the convoys left the home port there was a possibility that the same kind of attack would be launched as that to which convoys were subjected in Nelsonian days; there was the danger, that is, that surface war vessels, raiders or cruisers, might escape from their German bases and swoop down upon them.
We always had before our minds the activities of the _Moewe_, and we therefore deemed it necessary to escort the convoys across the ocean with battleships and cruisers, just as was the practice a century ago.
The British did not have ships enough available for this purpose, and here again the American navy was able to supply the lack; for we had a number of pre-dreadnoughts and cruisers that were ideally adapted to this kind of work.
III
On April 30th I received a message from Admiral Jellicoe requesting me to visit him at the Admiralty. When I arrived he said that the projected study of the convoy system had been made, and he handed me a copy of it.
It had been decided to send one experimental convoy from Gibraltar. The Admiralty, he added, had not yet definitely decided that the convoy system should be adopted, but there was every intention of giving it a thorough and fair trial. That same evening at dinner I met Mr. Lloyd George, Sir Edward Carson, and Lord Milner, and once more discussed with them the whole convoy idea. I found the Prime Minister especially favourable to the plan and, in fact, civilians in general were more kindly disposed toward the convoy than seamen, because they were less familiar with the nautical and shipping difficulties which it involved.
Naval officers were immediately sent to Gibraltar to instruct the merchant masters in the details of a.s.sembling and conducting vessels.
Eight-knot ships were selected for the experiment, and a number of destroyers were a.s.signed for their protection. The merchant captains, as was to be expected, regarded the whole enterprise suspiciously, but entered into it with the proper spirit.
On May 20th that first convoy arrived at its English destination in perfect condition. The success with which it made the voyage disproved all the pessimistic opinions which the merchant sailors had entertained about themselves. They suddenly discovered, as I had contended, that they could do practically everything which, in their conferences with the Admiralty, they had declared that they were unable to do. In those meetings they had a.s.serted that not more than two ships could keep station; but now they discovered that the whole convoy could sail with stipulated distances between the vessels and keep this formation with little difficulty. They were drilled on the way in zigzagging and manoeuvring--a practice carried out subsequently with all convoys--and by the time they reached the danger zone they found that, in obedience to a prearranged signal, all the ships could turn as a single one, and perform all the zigzag evolutions which the situation demanded. They had a.s.serted that they could not sail at night without lights and that an attempt to do so would result in many collisions, but the experimental convoy proved that this was merely another case of self-delusion.
Naturally the arrival of this convoy caused the greatest satisfaction in the Admiralty, but the most delighted men were the merchant captains themselves, for the whole thing was to them a complete revelation of their seamanly ability, and naturally it flattered their pride. The news of this arrival naturally travelled fast in shipping circles; it completely changed the att.i.tude of the merchant sailors, and the chief opponents of the convoy now became its most enthusiastic advocates.
Outside shipping circles, however, nothing about this convoy was known at that time. Yet May 20th, the date when it reached England safely, marked one of the great turning-points of the war. That critical voyage meant nothing less than that the Allies had found the way of defeating the German submarine. The world might still clamour for a specific "invention" that would destroy all the submarines overnight, or it might demand that the Allies should block them in their bases, or suggest that they might do any number of impossible things, but the naval chiefs of the Allies discovered, on May 20, 1917, that they could defeat the German campaign even without these rather uncertain aids. The submarine danger was by no means ended when this first convoy arrived; many anxious months still lay ahead of us; other means would have to be devised that would supplement the convoy; yet the all-important fact was that the Allied chiefs now realized, for the first time, that the problem was not an insoluble one; and that, with hard work and infinite patience, they could keep open the communications that were essential to victory. The arrival of these weather-beaten ships thus brought the a.s.surance that the armies and the civilian populations could be supplied with food and materials, and that the seas could be kept open for the transportation of American troops to France. In fine, it meant that the Allies could win the war.
On May 21st the British Admiralty, which this experimental convoy had entirely converted, voted to adopt the convoy system for all merchant shipping. Not long afterward the second convoy arrived safely from Hampton Roads, and then other convoys began to put in from Scandinavian ports. On July 21st I was able definitely to report to Washington that "the success of the convoys so far brought in shows that the system will defeat the submarine campaign if applied generally and in time."
But while we recognize the fact that the convoy preserved our communications and so made possible the continuation of the war, we must not overlook a vitally important element in its success. In describing the work of the destroyer, which was the protecting arm of the convoy, I have said nothing about the forces that really laid the whole foundation of the anti-submarine campaign. All the time that these destroyers were fighting off the submarines the power that made possible their operations was cruising quietly in the North Sea, doing its work so inconspicuously that the world was hardly aware of its existence. For back of all these operations lay the mighty force of the Grand Fleet.
Admiral Beatty"s dreadnoughts and battle cruisers, which were afterward supplemented by a fine squadron of American ships, kept the German surface vessels penned in their harbours and in this way left the ocean free for the operations of the Allied surface craft. I have already said that, in April, 1917, the Allied navies, while they controlled the surface of the water, did not control the subsurface, which at that time was practically at the disposition of the Germans. Yet the determining fact, as we were now to learn, was that this control of the surface was to give us the control of the subsurface also. Only the fact that the battleships kept the German fleet at bay made it possible for the destroyers and other surface craft to do their beneficent work. In an open sea battle their surface navies would have disposed of the German fleet; but let us suppose for a moment that an earthquake, or some other great natural disturbance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa Flow.
The world would then have been at Germany"s mercy and all the destroyers the Allies could have put upon the sea would have availed them nothing, for the German battleships and battle cruisers could have sunk them or driven them into their ports. Then Allied commerce would have been the prey, not only of the submarines, which could have operated with the utmost freedom, but of the German surface craft as well. In a few weeks the British food supplies would have been exhausted. There would have been an early end to the soldiers and munitions which Britain was constantly sending to France. The United States could have sent no forces to the Western Front and the result would have been the surrender which the Allies themselves, in the spring of 1917, regarded as not a remote possibility. America would then have been compelled to face the German power alone, and to face it long before we had had an opportunity of a.s.sembling our resources and of equipping our armies. The world was preserved from all these calamities because the destroyer and the convoy solved the problem of the submarine and because back of these agencies of victory lay Admiral Beatty"s squadrons, holding at arm"s length the German surface ships while these comparatively fragile craft were saving the liberties of the world.
CHAPTER IV
AMERICAN DESTROYERS IN ACTION
I
Our first division of destroyers reached Queenstown on a Friday morning, May 4, 1917; the following Monday they put to sea on the business of hunting the submarine and protecting commerce. For the first month or six weeks they spent practically all their time on patrol duty in company with British destroyers, sloops, and other patrol vessels.
Though the convoy system was formally adopted in the latter part of May, it was not operating completely and smoothly until August or September.
Many troop and merchant convoys were formed in the intervening period and many were conducted through the submarine zone by American destroyers; but our ships spent much time sailing singly, hunting for such enemies as might betray their presence, or escorting individual cargoes. The early experiments had demonstrated the usefulness of the convoy system, yet a certain number of pessimists still refused to accept it as the best solution of the shipping problem; and to reorganize practically all the shipping of the world, scattered everywhere on the seven seas, necessarily took time.
But this intervening period furnished indispensable training for our men. They gained an every-day familiarity with the waters which were to form the scene of their operations and learned many of the tricks of the German submarines. It was a strange world in which these young Americans now found themselves. The life was a hard one, of course, in those tempestuous Irish waters, with the little destroyers jumping from wave to wave, sometimes showing daylight beneath their keels, their bows frequently pointing skyward, or plunged deep into heavy seas, and their sides occasionally ploughing along under the foamy waves. For days the men lived in a world of fog and mist; rain in those regions seemed to be almost the normal state of nature. Much has been written about the hardships of life aboard the destroyer, and to these narratives our men could add many details of their own. These hardships, however, did not weigh heavily upon them, for existence in those waters, though generally monotonous, possessed at times plenty of interest and excitement. The very appearance of the sea showed that our men were engaging in a kind of warfare very different from that for which they had been trained. The enormous amount of shipping seemed to give the lie to the German reports that British commerce had been practically arrested. A perpetual stream of all kinds of vessels, liners, tramps, schooners, and fishing boats, was pa.s.sing toward the Irish and the English coasts. Yet here and there other floating objects on the surface told the story. Now it was a stray boat filled with the survivors of a torpedoed vessel; now a raft on which lay the bodies of dead men; now the derelict hulk of a ship which the Germans had abandoned as sunk, but which persisted in floating aimlessly around, a constant danger to navigation. Loose mines, bobbing in the water, hinted at the perils that were constantly threatening our forces. In the tense imagination of the lookouts floating spars or other debris easily took the form of periscopes. Queer-looking sailing vessels, at a distance, aroused suspicions that they might be submarines in disguise. A phosph.o.r.escent trail in the water was sometimes mistaken for the wake of a torpedo. The cover of a hatchway floating on the surface, if seen at a distance of a few hundred yards, looked much like the conning-tower of a submarine, while the back of an occasional whale gave a life-like representation of a U-boat awash--in fact, so life-like was it that on one occasion several of our submarine chasers on the English coast dropped depth charges on a whale and killed it.
But it was the invisible rather than the visible evidences of warfare that especially impressed our men. The air all around them was electric with life and information. One had only to put the receiver of the wireless to his ear to find himself in a new and animated world. The atmosphere was constantly spluttering messages of all kinds coming from all kinds of places. Sometimes these were sent by Admiral Bayly from Queenstown; they would direct our men to go to an indicated spot and escort an especially valuable cargo ship; they would tell a particular commander that a submarine was lying at a designated lat.i.tude and longitude and instruct him to go and "get" it. Running conversations were frequently necessary between destroyers and the ships which they had been detailed to escort. "Give me your position," the destroyer would ask. "What is the name of your a.s.sistant surgeon, and who is his friend on board our ship?" the suspicious vessel would reply--such precaution being necessary to give a.s.surance that the query had not come from a German submarine. "Being pursued by a submarine Lat. 50 N., Long.
15 W."--cries of distress like this were common. Another message would tell of a vessel that was being sh.e.l.led; another would tell of a ship that was sinking; while other messages would give the location of lifeboats which were filled with survivors and ask for speedy help. Our wireless operators not only received the news of friends, but also the messages of enemies. Conversations between German submarines frequently filled the air. They sometimes attempted to deceive us by false "S.O.S."
signals, hoping that in this way they could get an opportunity to torpedo any vessel that responded to the call. But these attempts were unsuccessful, for our wireless operators had no difficulty in recognizing the "spark" of the German instruments. At times the surface of the ocean might be calm; there would not be a ship in sight or a sign of human existence anywhere; yet the air itself would be uninterruptedly filled with these reminders of war.
The duties of our destroyers, in these earliest days, were to hunt for submarines, to escort single ships, to pick up survivors in boats, and to go to the rescue of ships that were being attacked. For the purpose of patrol the sea was divided into areas thirty miles square; and to each of these one destroyer, sloop, or other vessel was a.s.signed. The ship was required to keep within its allotted area, unless the pursuit of a submarine should lead it into a neighbouring one. This patrol, as I have described, was not a satisfactory way of fighting submarines. A vessel would occasionally get a distant glimpse of the enemy, but that was all; as soon as the U-boat saw the ship, it simply dived to security beneath the waves. Our destroyers had many chances to fire at the enemy but usually at very long ranges; some of them had lively sc.r.a.ps, which perhaps involved the destruction of U-boats, though this was always a difficult thing to prove. Yet the mere fact that submarines were seldom sunk by destroyers on patrol, either by ourselves or by the Allies, did not mean that the latter accomplished nothing. The work chiefly expected of destroyers on patrol was that they should keep the U-boats under the surface as much as possible and protect commerce. Normally the submarine sails on top of the water, looking for its prey. As long as it is beyond the merchantmen"s range of vision, it uses its high surface speed of about 14 knots to attain a position ahead of the advancing vessel; before the surface vessel reaches a point where its lookout can see the submarine, the U-boat dives and awaits the favourable moment for firing its torpedo. It cannot take these preliminary steps if there is a destroyer anywhere in the neighbourhood; the mere presence of such a warship therefore const.i.tutes a considerable protection to any merchant ship that is within sight. The submarine normally prefers to use its guns on merchant ships, for the torpedoes are expensive and comparatively few in number. Destroyers constantly interfered with these gunning operations. A long distance shot usually was sufficient to make the under-water vessel submerge and thus lose its power for doing harm.
The early experiences of our destroyers with submarines were of this kind; but the work of chasing U-boats under the water, escorting a small proportion of the many cargo ships, and picking up survivors, important as it was, did not really const.i.tute effective anti-submarine warfare.
It gave our men splendid training, it saved many a merchant ship, it rescued many victims from the extreme dangers of German ruthlessness, it sank a small number of submarines, but it could never have won the war.
This patrol by destroyers and light surface vessels has been criticized as affording an altogether ineffective method of protecting shipping, especially when compared with the convoy system. This criticism is, of course, justified; still we must understand that it was the only possible method until we had enough anti-submarine craft to make the convoy practicable. Nor must we forget that this Queenstown patrol was organized systematically and operated with admirable skill and tireless energy. Most of this duty fell at this time upon the British destroyers, sloops, and other patrol vessels, which were under the command of Admiral Bayly, and these operations were greatly aided by the gallant actions of the British Q-ships, or "mystery ships." Though some of the admirable exploits of these vessels will be recorded in due time, it may be said here that the record which these ships made was not only in all respects worthy of the traditions of their great service, but also that they exhibited an endurance, a gallantry, and seamanlike skill that has few parallels in the history of naval warfare.