Early efforts at ‘listening’ for enemy submarines yielded very poor results, partly because at the start only boats lying absolutely still in the water could be used, to avoid noise interruption. More importantly, the capability was only directional. It could not even roughly pinpoint a submarine’s position. Marder was rightly critical of the wartime results, but the system was only introduced at the very end of the conflict in November 1918. A mere seven ships were fitted and, as a result, only three sinkings and twenty-two cases of submarines being damaged were attributable to hydrophone detection. Again, it was the foundation for very successful future systems, in this case, ASDIC (supposedly named after the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee, but this is now disputed).27
There were some pretty unconventional ideas given airtime as well. Training seagulls to land on periscopes was one. Duff, for example, was extremely critical of the idea of training sea lions to track German submarines: ‘Valuable time, personnel and money had in fact to be wasted to prove the futility and childishness of this contention’.28 Clearly, no stone was left unturned.
The use of aircraft for spotting did not start well either, although when America entered the war, they came with a seaplane which changed the game considerably. The Curtiss H12 flying boat had a six-hour endurance and soon began flying ASW patrols out of Felixstowe and then Yarmouth.* A new search pattern was developed and was able to effectively cover an area so large that German submarines would be exposed to observation for the ten hours they took to pass through the area. The new pattern was the so-called the ‘spider’s web’, a search pattern flown in an ever-decreasing circle. By August 1917 the British added kite balloons towed by destroyers. Like aircraft, balloons were able to spot an enemy submarine at long distances, allowing a convoy’s accompanying destroyers to either peel off and attack the submarine at a safe distance from the convoy itself, or for the convoy to alter its track around the submarine’s assumed path.29
The increased arming of civilian ships such as trawlers and so-called Q-ships – armed merchantmen with their weapons disguised, a tactic introduced earlier in the war – continued. By the start of 1917 1,420 merchantmen had been armed; by July it was 3,001.30 Throughout the war, the number of submarine sinkings directly attributable to Q-ships was only around thirteen, but in his book The Submarine Peril, Jellicoe shows that the fact of being armed increased the ship’s chances of survival dramatically.31 In 1916 both Q-ships or otherwise armed ships were more successful in escaping a submarine attack than an unarmed ship – in fact, more than doubly likely to escape.
Submarines Attacks January 1916 – January 1917
In 1917 alone sixty-three duels were fought between Q-ships and submarines, so one would imagine the impact on tactics to be quite high. It has, in fact, been argued that the Q-ship increasingly encouraged unrestricted warfare and, overall, that could benefit the Allies. The existence of guns, whether hidden or in sight, would force the submarine to use its limited supply of torpedoes instead of surfacing to use its deck guns, and so necessitate more harbour runs for torpedo rearming.
Q-ships in Operation and Duels 1915–1917
In operation
Duels
1915
‘approx a dozen in use’
8
Percentage
66%
1917
180
63
Percentage
35%
Source: Gibson and Pendergast, The German Submarine War 1914–1918, p55.
Not much is said about British submarines being used as sub-killers, but around seventeen German submarines were sunk by their British counterparts during the war. Had it not been for the unreliability of British torpedoes, ‘not running straight, or passing under even large ships, and failing to explode even when they did make a hit’, the number could have been substantially greater.32
Convoy may have become one of the mainstays of the ASW effort, but ‘it was not just the introduction of the convoy system that ultimately thwarted the U-boat threat’. Mcfarlane writes that ‘it was a combination of that and the offensive measures developed by the Anti-Submarine Division that ultimately solved the problem, which in turn gives credence to Jellicoe’s leadership and effectiveness as First Sea Lord’. It also became the most controversial.
At the time it was believed that the destroyer was the only effective antisubmarine hunter, but when it came to destroyers, Britain ‘could not possibly produce the necessary escort vessels and that, until this difficulty was overcome, we should have to postpone the introduction of a convoy system’. But again, Jellicoe held his options open; Temple Patterson said ‘he appears to have been somewhat holding his judgement.’33 He went on immediately to say that the havoc that the German raider Möwe was wreaking might mean that the system might have to be introduced in the Atlantic to protect trade and that ‘the question must be borne in mind’.* Convoy protection had to be evaluated in the light of the country’s overall naval strategy, particularly the role and well-being of the Grand Fleet itself: ‘The Grand Fleet is the centre and the pivot on which all naval operations depend … The safety and efficiency of the Grand Fleet to a very large extent depend … on its destroyers and to carry out any policy that involves a reduction in (their) numbers increases the already considerable risks we now take’.34
In a private letter to his father-in-law Sir Charles Cayzer in May 1915, Jellicoe shows that he already recognised the importance of destroyers in an ASW role: ‘We could finish the submarines off pretty successfully if we had double the number of destroyers we have now. I hope it will be a lesson for the future, but I expect all will be forgotten in five years time.’35
There are a number of considerations that need to be borne in mind when looking to answer the question of how many destroyers were actually needed. First, how many destroyers were available after the needs of the Grand Fleet and the destroyer flotilla commands were met; secondly, what was the effective ratio of covering destroyers to merchantmen; and, thirdly, what types of vessels were available. Finally, it would need to be decided how many merchantmen would have to be escorted. This issue became a matter of contention.
In February 1917 Jellicoe calculated that around forty destroyers or sloops were available from what Terraine estimates were the 283 in ‘home waters’.36 As mentioned, in coming to this number Jellicoe was adamant about not reducing the destroyer fleets of Harwich, Dover, the east coast or the Portsmouth commands. He still felt – like Beatty – that the destroyer protection for the Grand Fleet itself was weak: ‘It was not until late 1915 that the number of destroyers attached to the Grand Fleet available was sufficient to screen the battle fleet adequately. An Anti-Submarine screen for cruisers was not available until the end of 1916.’37
The American president sent Admiral Sims, an old friend of Jellicoes since his China days, on a secret mission to London to understand the gravity of Britain’s position. He travelled in civilian clothes, but was nevertheless a well-known officer, so his arrival was not kept totally secret. Sims understood the critical dilemma in which Jellicoe found himself: ‘The British Navy in 1917 did not possess destroyers enough both to guard the main fighting fleet and to protect its commerce from submarines’.38 ‘At our average moment… we could not expect more than seventy destroyers and eight leaders would be with the Fleet’, around the same number that were at Jutland.39 Beatty told Jellicoe that ‘we are so very short of them …ifwe have to go to sea, we could not screen efficiently the squadrons’ With the destroyer question, Jellicoe was walking on the edge of a razor.40
It may be that Jellicoe overstated needs. At one end of the spectrum, Oliver was comfortable with one destroyer for every twenty merchantmen, thinking it sufficient,41 but at the other, the 1917 Convoy Committee’s conclusion may seem high: eight destroyers for a convoy over twenty-two ships, seven for between sixteen and twenty-two, and six for under sixteen ships.
Until he could get his hands on more destroyers, Jell
icoe was of the opinion that the adoption of convoy for the transatlantic routes would have to be ‘postponed’. This, maybe, is as close as one gets to what I feel is a misleading conclusion that Jellicoe was ‘resolutely opposed’ to convoy.42 It is interesting to pause for a moment here to emphasise that, even though Scheer had changed strategy and was now keeping the battle fleet more or less leashed in harbour, the High Seas Fleet still represented the threat of a ‘fleet in being’, in that the eighty-strong Grand Fleet destroyer screen could not easily be released from Scapa Flow for other duties in anticipation of possible action. Having been impounded, the German fleet was, in fact, rusting away. Boredom and frustration set in; already starkly hierarchical social divisions became more acute. The fleet had become a cancerous sore in the German military machine. Jutland had unleashed not just one, but three, evil genies: unrestricted U-boat warfare, locking up the destroyer screens in Scapa Flow and the fomenting of eventual German mutiny.
At this point Jellicoe was deeply fearful that Britain was losing the war and he did not hesitate from saying so, even if he sounded defeatist. But he was still able to persuade the Americans, as newly allied partners, to help solve what he probably saw as the most pressing obstacle: the destroyer shortage. Within four days of Sims’s arrival in Liverpool on 9 April 1917, Jellicoe had persuaded the American to help with the immediate delivery of destroyers.43
Jellicoe was not quick to embrace the idea of transatlantic convoy but, unlike many others in the Admiralty, he certainly did not reject it out of hand.44 In fact, Winton found his attitude to convoy ‘curiously difficult to define. He was doubtful about its efficacy, but he never voiced those doubts strongly enough to suggest that he was a real opponent.’45 True to his professional nature and his character, he always wanted his decision to be based on a careful analysis of what was and was not working, on what the options were, and on what the limitations and considerations were, rather than on a hunch. For one of his biographers, Altham, this meant that he ‘constantly emphasised that there was no single specific antidote to the submarine’. The solution lay in a multi-layered approach to the problem.46
In The Submarine Peril Jellicoe later wrote that the convoy question was receiving ‘constant consideration’ at the Admiralty in early 1917, but that ‘objections to it were, until a later date, far too strong to admit of its adoption’.47 I think his phrasing is wrong here. It would have been more precise if he talked about the ‘implications surrounding the introduction of convoy on the Atlantic [my italics] trade routes’. There were significant obstacles to getting a successful convoy system in place: first, the lack of destroyers; then the impossibility of assembling convoys in the neutral harbours or even the territorial waters of the United States (until, that is, the American declaration of war on 6 April);48 the difficulty in keeping station; darkening ship; the very large lack of bridge to engine room voice pipes needed for frequent changes of speed; of new port facilities to handle very large simultaneous arrivals of shipping; the new communications and procedures between Merchant Navy and Royal Navy ships; the concern of convoys running into minefields en masse and the new training and schedules that were needed. As a totally integrated system, convoy was a daunting task.
When looking at the specifics of the transatlantic trade routes one can add the narrowing ‘cone’ effect of the three major trade routes converging on the British Isles: the southern routes converging off the Scilly Isles for ships heading for either the Channel ports or for Bristol, the lower western trade from the Caribbean converging on the Fastnet rock and turning to Bristol or Liverpool, and the North American and Canadian trade heading past Tory Island and heading to the northern ports of Liverpool and the Clyde. Jellicoe added a fourth route, which narrowed after passing around northern Scotland at the Orkneys. The natural choke-points made any attacker’s task much easier.
In Cabinet Sir Maurice Hankey had always been a strong proponent of a system of convoy. His only real concern was that a concentration of ships might actually increase the ease of their being found by an enemy submarine, to which Churchill later correctly pointed out that the very concentration of ships reduced the probability of chance sightings by a patrolling enemy submarine. Escort was the obvious answer but, with the shortfall in the numbers needed for individual escort, difficult to realise. So grouping merchant ships together into a convoy was an immediate route to a solution. Hankey claims to have been the person who persuaded Lloyd George of the solution and he had already met early in 1917, on 11 February, with Jellicoe and Duff, where the civilian explained what he called his ‘brainwave’ to the two admirals as though they had never thought about the subject.
A week or so later, on 23 February, Jellicoe met with ten shipmasters. They were ‘firmly of the opinion that they would prefer to sail alone rather than in company and under convoy.’49 That Jellicoe went out of his way to put the questions as impartially as possible was confirmed by Captain Bertram Smith, a member of the Mercantile Movements Division at the Admiralty. Why wouldn’t he? What’s more, Jellicoe’s connections with the merchant marine were strong. His father had been a captain of the Southampton Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, and had gone to sea aged twelve. John Jellicoe had married Gwen Cayzer, whose father, Sir Charles Cayzer, owned one of the largest commercial shipping fleets of his age, the Clan Line.50 Jellicoe, in short, would most likely have been hearing a lot about the difficulties of the merchant fleets at first hand.
Lloyd George loved to hark back to the days of Nelson, so it is all the more ironic that even the revered Nelson was a little less taken by civilian sailors than he might have been: ‘They behaved, as all convoys that I ever saw, shamefully ill; parting company every day.’51 There is often surprise at the idea that convoy, such an established method of protecting civilian ships that had been used so extensively in the Napoleonic wars, was not taken up without further ado. The point has often been missed. The times and challenges were remarkably different. The submarine war of 1917 was the first naval war fought with an unseen enemy, the new technologies of W/T and hydrophone, as well as new weapons such as mines, torpedoes and the submarine itself. Speeds could touch 38 knots for fast torpedo boats or 8 knots submerged for submarines rather than the 2 or 3 knots as was the case at Trafalgar.
But the numbers with which the Admiralty argued their case – how many merchantmen needed to be escorted – were, apparently, wrong. A young commander, Reginald Henderson, had given Lloyd George different numbers. The prime minister later wrote in his autobiography that it was ‘a fatal error in accountantship which nearly lost us the war’ and one that would not have been made ‘by an ordinary clerk in a shipping office’. The real number of departures, he announced, was forty ships a day, not seven hundred. Supposedly, the Admiralty had counted all the small inshore movements in its figures. But, just maybe, the Admiralty had been caught in a trap of its own making. So as to not alarm the British public, the much higher, all-inclusive Customs returns data had been used in public communiqués so that the sinking ratios would look better. It happens in every war when the public is fed only what is deemed safe.
Actually, it now seems that the Admiralty not only had, but also used, the correct data. Captain Bertram Smith showed that the figure of ships leaving for just the American ports would have been around ten a day, a number which fits very closely with Reginald Hendersons overall forty a day estimate.52 Certainly, if the Admiralty was really basing policy on the much higher numbers, it would not only have been utterly incomprehensible, it would have been scandalous. But there is surprisingly little material on this point, which Lloyd George tried to turn into a press story.* Colvin, writing Carson’s biography in 1936, wrote scathingly about the whole affair: ‘Nor was it true to say, as has been alleged by several writers who ought to know better, that the Admiralty was deceived by a weekly return of entrances and clearances supplied by the Customs authorities, which included small craft and coast-wise traffic. This fable is on the face of it grotesque’.53
Jellicoe had implemented convoy for ammunition supplies to the Western Front. This had already been done by December 1916. The French coal trade, vital for the continuation of French factory production after a significant number of coalfields had been lost to German territorial gain, and the Scandinavian trade were also both under convoy protection. The French convoys were approved by Jellicoe on 17 January and, as a measure of success, of the 2,600 ships involved in this trade in April, only five were sunk by U-boats.55 Significantly, the Admiralty preferred not to use the word ‘convoy’ and called it a system of ‘controlled sailings’, as protection was given to the shipping lanes not groups of ships. The same Reginald Henderson who produced the estimates of sailings was the senior officer of the French convoy system, so the experience, the basis from which he spoke, was strong. At the end of January a system of protection was also implemented for the Scandinavian trade, but it was not that successful and by April high losses of 25 per cent were being sustained. After Duff and Oliver had themselves both approved, Jellicoe signed off on the findings of the resulting Longhope Conference on 21 April 1917.* It had concluded that a system of convoy should be used:
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 42
