Blackett's War (3 page)

ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 19, 1918,
eight days after the armistice that ended the war to end all wars, a train from London pulled into the depot at Parkeston Quay, just outside the East Anglia port town of Harwich, and a mob of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen spilled out onto the platform. Harwich had seen its ups and downs as a small North Sea port. In the Middle Ages the town prospered shipping bales of wool to the continent and importing French wines. In the seventeenth century, its dockyards served as an important supply and refitting base for the Royal Navy during the Dutch Wars; Samuel Pepys, the secretary to the Board of the Admiralty and keeper of the vain and ingenuous diaries that remain the most revealing account of life in Restoration England, represented the town in Parliament; and Harwich’s thriving private shipyards may, or may not, have built the merchant ship
Mayflower
, which carried the Pilgrim Fathers to America.

A slow decline in the nineteenth century—the royal dockyards closed in 1829—was abruptly reversed in the 1880s when the Great Eastern Railway Company developed a large new port on reclaimed land a mile up the River Stour from the town center. The railway was rerouted to a new station from which passengers could transfer directly to ferries that took them on to Gothenburg, Hamburg, and the Hook of Holland; there were freight yards, a hotel, and rows of terraced housing for workers. With the coming of war in 1914 the Royal Navy requisitioned the entire port—quays, hotel,
workshops, and all—and a force of destroyers and light cruisers and the 8th and 9th Submarine Flotillas moved in to guard the northern approaches to the English Channel.

And so Harwich, with its men who knew submarines and its facilities for handling them and its proximity to Germany’s North Sea naval bases, was chosen as the place where an unprecedented event in the history of naval warfare was to take place on the morning of November 20, 1918. The terms of capitulation the German government had agreed to were extraordinary and humiliating, a measure of the desperation that the swift collapse of Germany’s military situation had left her leaders facing. Fourteen articles of the Armistice dealt with the German navy. In addition to disarming all her warships and agreeing to have 10 battleships, 6 battle cruisers, 8 light cruisers, and 50 destroyers “of the most modern type” interned in neutral or Allied ports, Germany was to surrender outright “all submarines at present in existence … with armament and equipment complete.”

Article 22 continued:

Along with the horde of reporters, British submarine officers and men had been summoned from every port to be on hand to take charge of the enemy boats as they arrived. Accommodations at Parkeston, which included three moored depot ships, were packed far beyond capacity that evening of the 19th. The one “lady reporter” in the group was chivalrously offered the hotel billiard table as a bed for the night.
¹

A heavy fog shrouded the harbor the next morning as the destroyers
Melampus
and
Firedrake
, carrying the boarding parties and their attendant pack of press hounds, got under way at 7 a.m. heading for the point where the surrender was to take place; it was the southern end of the shipping channel known as the Sledway, about eight miles east-northeast of Harwich. A British airship droned out of the mist and passed to the north, quickly vanishing again in the fog. Then a few minutes before 10 a.m. a British light
cruiser suddenly came into sight in the distance, then two German transports flanked by more British warships.

And then there they were: a line of unmistakable, long thin hulls breaking the dark surface of the water, topped by domed conning towers, proceeding in straggling order. Two airships and three flying boats kept a continuous watch over the procession, passing and repassing low over the enemy boats as they came on slowly toward the rendezvous point. Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall, a British submarine torpedo officer, groped to find words to capture the incredulity he felt as he witnessed the scene from aboard the
Firedrake
: the dangerous and reclusive predator he and his comrades had hunted and feared and loathed, now meekly chivvied along like a few tame sheep. “Try and imagine what you would feel like,” he wrote, “if you were told to go to Piccadilly at 10 a.m. and see twenty man-eating tigers walk up from Hyde Park Corner and lie down in front of the Ritz to let you cut their tails off and put their leads on—and it was really so.”
²

A signal was given to the transports to anchor, and one by one the line of twenty U-boats joined them under the guns of the British destroyers. Motor launches came alongside the
Firedrake
and the
Melampus
, and the British boarding crews, two or three officers and fifteen men for each U-boat, scrambled aboard. Not sure what to expect, the officers all carried sidearms. “We were prepared for any eventuality except that which actually took place,” recalled King-Hall. “We were not prepared to find the Huns behaving for once as gentlemen.”

King-Hall’s boarding of
U-90
went by the book, with punctilious correctness. The German officers saluted; the salutes were duly returned; the German captain presented the signed terms of surrender—all equipment intact and in working order, all ballast tanks blown, torpedoes on board but disarmed, no booby traps—and the submarine’s officers seemed almost pathetically eager to be helpful, offering explanations of the operation of the boat and its gear. The same scene was being repeated all along the line. “My Hun,” remarked one of the British officers back in Harwich that evening, “might have been trying to sell me the boat, the blighter tried to be so obliging.”

As the submarines raised anchor the British crews ran up the white flag for the final transit into port. A strict order had been issued by the port commander that there would be no cheering or other demonstrations, and as the captured U-boats passed the ships in the harbor, crowded with spectators,
they were greeted by silence. By 4 p.m. they were moored to buoys at the head of the harbor (at what “the reporters now say we call ‘U-boat Avenue,’ ” King-Hall sarcastically noted); a motor launch came alongside and the Germans, who had meanwhile changed into civilian garb that made them look more like peacetime caricatures of German tourists, green felt hat and all, than officers of a fierce and proud militarist state, were told to gather their belongings and get aboard. The launch took them to one of the British destroyers, which delivered them to the German transports for the trip back home, without ever having set foot on British soil.

Over the next eleven days the scene was repeated in daily succession as ninety-four more U-boats surrendered at Harwich, all without incident. Some of the German sailors inquired pathetically of the boarding crews if they thought they might be able to find work as merchant seamen in China or Japan, if Germans were now unwelcome anywhere closer to home. Two refused to return to Germany and insisted on staying in England, where they hoped to find “work and good food.” Many of the surrendering boats were commanded by junior and plainly nervous young officers, their regular captains apparently having refused to make the humiliating voyage; others flew the red flag of the revolutionaries who had seized parts of the German fleet in the waning days of the war, their captains elected by the crews and holding commissions signed by the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Committee; in other boats the crews sullenly refused to obey orders of their regular officers except when it was clear that the order would be backed up by the British officer on board. Most, especially the older men who were members of the naval reserve and had been merchant sailors before the war, seemed simply relieved that it was over, and bade farewell to their boats with dry eyes and no apparent regrets.
³

In December 1918 the Allied Naval Commission discovered 62 additional seaworthy U-boats and another 149 still under construction at German bases and yards and ordered the immediate surrender of any that could sail or be towed and the destruction of the rest. The German government was warned that failure to turn over all of its U-boats intact would be answered by the Allies with the permanent occupation of its island naval base of Heligoland. The captured fleet, 176 boats in the end, was parceled out among the victors, most going to Britain and France, with token specimens awarded to the other Allies; Italy received 10, Japan 7, the United States 6, Belgium 2.
⁴

One of the behemoths of the German U-boat fleet—the “supersubmarine”
Deutschland
, originally constructed as a blockade-runner with
a cargo capacity of 750 tons—was scheduled to be broken up. But at the urging of members of Parliament it was instead towed to the Thames in October 1919 and exhibited to raise money for the King’s Fund for Sailors. “Poetic justice,” one member of Parliament declared with satisfaction.
⁵

But the real satisfaction to those who had battled this new undersea menace had come four months earlier, with the German signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Among its hundreds of detailed military stipulations, specifying everything from the maximum number of officers permitted in the headquarters of a cavalry division (15) to the number of rounds of ammunition that could be stocked per rifle or carbine (400), was Article 191, which declared: “The construction or acquisition of any submarine, even for commercial purposes, shall be forbidden in Germany.” In the course of the war Germany’s submarines had sunk over 5,000 Allied merchant vessels, totaling 12 million tons of shipping. No one before the war had imagined that the submarine, barely more than an inventor’s crackpot dream a few years earlier, would have been capable of bringing Great Britain, and its mightiest fleet on earth, to the edge of catastrophe in 1917; no one had imagined the inhumanity that the submarine would make routine and inevitable once it was unleashed in the only way it could be truly effective as a weapon of total war. But what man’s sordid ingenuity for destruction had created, the majesty of international law as decently dreamed of by Woodrow Wilson, and cynically seconded by his more worldly wise allies in London and Paris, would nobly or ignobly contain.

IT WAS THE SPEED
of technological progress, more than anything, that had left conventional naval thinking so far behind. In 1887, a dredger working its way through Kiel harbor struck a large obstacle buried in the mud. After considerable effort the object was grappled to the surface, and when layers of seaweed and encrusted barnacles were scraped away, the astonished workers found themselves staring at a 40-ton, 26-foot-long hulk of sheet-iron plates, shaped like a child’s drawing of a rather rectangular whale. The relic turned out to be
Le Plongeur Marin
, a three-man submersible conceived by a Bavarian artillery corporal named William Bauer, who had dreamed of a daring strike against the blockading enemy fleet during Germany’s war with Denmark in 1850. During a trial dive on February 1, 1851, a slug of iron ballast that could be screwed forward or aft on a threaded rod to control the boat’s inclination came loose and slid to the bow. The
Plongeur
, true to its
name, promptly nosed straight down and headed for the bottom. Bauer and his crew of two came to an abrupt halt sixty feet below the harbor’s surface. With remarkable presence of mind, Bauer realized their only hope was to flood the compartment with water to compress the remaining air trapped inside until its pressure equaled the force of the seawater bearing against the hatches on the outside, allowing the hatches to swing open. Convincing his two sailors to carry out these orders was another matter, but after a violent argument—and five hours of effort—his desperate plan succeeded, and the men “shot up to the surface like corks out of a champagne bottle,” one witness recounted.
⁶

The inventor of
Le Plongeur Marin
was scarcely distinguishable from scores of other obsessives, monomaniacs, and crackpots who for centuries had been drawn to the idea of undersea travel; only the dream of flying through the air held a greater allure for the legion of half-mad inventors. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, intrepid American experimenters had built tiny submersibles with which they attempted to fasten explosive charges to British warships on dark nights off New York and Long Island. They all failed, but rattled the British nonetheless, who were left sputtering with indignation over such unsportsmanlike conduct; beside submarines the Americans had sent floating kegs of explosives adrift toward the anchored enemy ships and planted booby traps in decoy vessels filled with naval stores that they let fall into British hands. “It appears the Enemy are disposed to make use of every unfair and Cowardly mode of Warfare,” fumed the British admiral commanding the Royal Navy’s forces fighting America in the War of 1812.
⁷

There was always something of the ludicrous and harebrained, or at least tragicomic, in these inventors’ schemes: their makeshift submersibles, looking about as seaworthy as a whiskey barrel, leaked furiously and were barely controllable. All were conceived upon the extremely dubious operational premise that they would approach an enemy ship undetected, laboriously augering a hole or plunging a harpoon into its wooden hull below the waterline to affix a charge, then retreat a safe distance, again undetected, before finally yanking a lanyard to set off the explosion. In everything from their basic sailing properties to their purported military utility they depended as much on the sheer daredeviltry of their pilots as on the technological ingenuity that went into their conception. Their hand-powered screws and cranks and valves looked more like something out of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks of the fifteenth century than the naval architecture of the nineteenth.