Thread: Submarine: The Beginning

Many nations have contributed to the development of the submarine but Germany seemed predestined to make more of its potential than any other country. As early as 1850 a non-commissioned army officer from Bavaria called Wilhelm Bauer produced his Seetaucher or Sea Diver, as an answer to the blockade by Danish men-o'-war. He succeeded in his purpose, and the Danes kept a more respectful distance, just as the British had been forced to do after David Bushnell's Turtle had attacked Lord Howe's flagship off New York in 1776. Bauer persevered with his experiments, but in February 1851 the Seetaucher's iron hull buckled, and she plunged to the bottom of Kiel Harbour. His Bavarian sense of discipline prevailed and he persuaded his two panic-stricken seamen to do the one thing that would save their lives. They allowed more water to enter, until the pressure was sufficient to burst the hatches open and let all three men swim to the surface. It is only a coincidence that the rusting hull of the Seetaucher was found in 1887 during dredging in Kiel, but the discovery came at a time when German interest in submarines had revived, and she was subsequently exhibited outside the Naval School. The disaster marked the beginning of a decline in Bauer's fortunes, and his backers must have withdrawn their support. For lack of funds he was forced to offer his ideas abroad, first to Austria and then to Great Britain, involved at the time in the Crimean War. But little came of these enquiries, and finally Bauer turned to the Russians, who provided him with funds to build his second submarine, called the Seeteufel or Sea Devil. But again, Bauer's luck ran out, and when the Seeteufel sank the Russians refused to sanction any further expenditure, leaving Bauer to drift into obscurity. Another 30 years passed before German inventors turned their minds to submarines, but in 1890 two boats were built to the designs of the Swedish Nordenfelt company at Kiel and Danzig. Just what happened to these boats, W.I and W.2, is not known, but they were not bought by the German Navy, which maintained as sceptical an attitude as any. Indeed, Admiral Tirpitz defended his conservatism stoutly, saying that he would never adopt any new weapon until its military usefulness had been clearly demonstrated even if it meant hardship to inventors. If the performance of Turkey's two Nordenfelts is any yardstick, the German Navy had lost little ground by refusing to buy W.I and W.2, and it must be assumed that they remained in their builders hands until sold for scrap.

(From L to R) U.22, U.20, U.19, and U.21, the first truly seagoing U-Boats. With their eight-cylinder diesel motors they had greater endurance and speed. They drew heavily on experiance from the earlier prototypes and were to bear the brunt of early patrols in WWI

The Tirpitz ban on submarines meant that the next German submarine also had to be built as a private venture. In February 1902 Krupp's new Germania shipyard at Kiel began work on a small submarine, designed to enable the company to keep abreast of developments in Britain, France and the United States. There was little originality in the design, and she was like the French Gymnote, designed by Gustave Zede nearly 15 years earlier. She displaced only 15.5 tons, and her electric motor gave her a radius of action of only 4.5 miles. The boat was laid down in July 1902 and launched on 8 June 1903; she attracted a lot of attention from the Imperial Navy, but no offers were made to buy her. The Emperor watched a demonstration, and his brother Prince Henry of Prussia even went to sea in her. Had it not been for the Russo-Japanese War the Navy Office might have relented and bought her for evaluation, but as things turned out, the Russians were only too glad to buy her. Under the name of Forel (Trout) she ran trials off St Petersburg in the summer of 1904 and was then loaded onto a railway truck for shipment to Vladivostok via the TransSiberian Railway. It would be nice to say that the first successful German submarine covered herself with honours, but nothing more was heard of the Forel. She probably reached Vladivostok safely, but there is no record of her operations, and she is believed to have been scrapped about 1911. But the Russians did not give up easily, and in June 1904 they ordered three more submarines from Krupp, the Karp, Karas and Kambala. These followed a much more ambitious design, intended to be autonomous unlike the little Forel, which had to recharge her batteries before each run from a mother-ship or a shore-based generator. Krupp was confident that he could produce a much bigger boat, for he had recently recruited the Frenchman. d'Equevilley, who based his designs on the ideas of the leading French submarine designer, Maxime Laubeuf, but without the cumbersome steam engine used in French submersibles for surface-running. Another improvement by d'Equevilley was to stow fuel in the external ballast tanks, but whereas he proposed the use of a benzol or gasoline motor for surface-running. Krupp would not allow the use of such volatile fuels, and insisted on a heavy oil with a lower flashpoint. The American Holland design, which was adopted by the Royal Navy as well as the US Navy, was already notorious for the explosions of petrol fumes, which rapidly concentrated in the confined space of a submarine. There was not yet sufficient faith in the new Diesel engine which worked on compression ignition, although the French Navy had ordered its first Diesel driven submarine, the Aigrette, in May 1902. But the firm of Korting Brothers was making heavy oil engines driven by kerosene for use in motor launches and heavy trucks, and although it's most powerful unit only developed 8hp, the company was willing to develop a 200 brake horsepower (bhp) unit to Krupp's specification. And so the Karp Class were promised a much safer propulsion system, although it must be said that the dense clouds of white kerosene fumes emitted by the Korting engines were not ideal for a craft which relied on secrecy and stealth. To make matters worse, a tall exhaust-funnel had to be provided to carry the choking fumes clear of the conning tower, and this had to be lowered and stowed before the boat could dive, adding to the time taken to submerge. The Russian boats left for Libau in 1906-7 but not before they were examined by the Navy, and as a result the Marineamt finally decided to order the first unterseeboot ('undersea boat') A total of 1.5 million marks (approximately £73,000 or $292,000 at pre-1914 prices) was allocated in the 1905-6 Navy Estimates. Her keel was laid on 30 August 1905 and her launching took place at the Germania Yard on 4 August 1906. She was handed over at the end of that year, and spent the next 18 months on trials to evaluate her performance. She was very similar to the Russian boats, displacing 238 tonnes on the surface, and 283 tonnes submerged; her armament was only a single bow torpedo-tube, and three 45cm torpedoes. She was good for 10.8 knots on the surface and could make 8.7 knots underwater in short bursts, but her surface endurance proved in practice to be a good deal less than the 1500 miles promised by the designers. In short, U.1 was only moderately successful.

The official report on her trials under Leutnant Bartenbach, later to command the Flanders submarines, stated that she was unfit for opera¬tions at any distance from the coast, as her employment on the high seas was dangerous. But she had proved that the concept was basi¬cally sound, and in March 1906, a month before U.1 took the water, an improved type was laid down at the Imperial Dockyard, Danzig. This was U.2, ten feet longer and over 100 tons heavier. She had more powerful machinery, 600bhp (brake horsepower) Daimler engines and 630shp (shaft horsepower) electric motors, and carried two 45cm torpedo-tubes at the bow and another two in the stern. Like U.1 she was largely experimental, not reliable enough for operations far from base, and her endurance was no higher.
To those officers dedicated to developing the new weapon, the official policy was far too cautious. In 1908 when U.2 entered service, the US Navy had a dozen submarines, the French had 60 and Great Britain had 68; Germany had only two small prototypes and another two building. But the foreign submarines were also, for the most part, small coastal types. While the older French types were quite useless for combat, the Marineamt was trying to ensure that each successive design was a major improve¬ment. The pair ordered in August 1907, U.3 and U.4, were nearly 200 tons heavier than U.1 and had better endurance. By the end of 1907 it was possible to assess the experience so far and this was embodied in four “desiderata�

1.15 knots surface speed and 10.5 knots submerged.
2. 2000 miles endurance on the surface.
3. A complement of 20officers and men, with 72 hours air-supply.
4. Four torpedo-tubes, with reloads for the two bow-tubes.

These qualities forced a further rise in displacement to provide both habitability and power, and in all 14 boats were built to develop the characteristics. The stumbling block was the Korting engine which could only produce about 300 to 350 brake horsepower, whereas 15 knots required a minimum of 500hp per shaft and ideally 600hp. The answer was to couple two different types of Korting engine to each shaft, an eight-cylinder 350bhp unit and a six-cylinder 225 or 250bhp unit. Even so, few of the so-called “desiderata-boats� U.5 to U.18, could make the desired speed, and it varied from about 13.5 in U.5-8 to 14.5 in U.9-12 in ideal conditions. (U.16 did manage 15.5 knots on trials.) To remedy this failing U.17 and U.18 were given two of the bigger eight-cylinder Kortings coupled to each shaft, pushing the horsepower up to a total of 1400.

A U-Boat engine-room was cramped and densely packed with machinery and control gear. The engineer officer and his crew wore leather clothing to protect them from the grease and the clammy condesation.

Nobody was happy with the four-engine drive, and it was at last recognised that the Korting engine had reached its limit of development. In November 1910 orders were placed for four more boats, U.19-22, but this time they were to be driven by two MAN eight-cylinder diesel engines, each developing 850bhp. Krupp had also been investigating the possibility of diesels for U-Boats and had developed both two-cycle and four-cycle versions, but in the end it was the MAN design which won the competition. Even so, the first diesel-engined submarine built in Germany was not for the Imperial Navy but for the Italians; the Atropa (1911-13) was given two 350bhp Krupp diesels but in other ways resembled U.2. Not until July 1913 when U.19 commissioned, did the German Navy possess a diesel-driven submarine, by which time the French, Russians, British and Americans had all adopted this excellent (German) invention for their submarines.
Time was running out for the German Navy, for the Agadir Crisis in 1911 revealed that her diplomats had not only failed to lull British suspicions about the expansion of the Imperial Navy, but had so alienated British opinion as to make them likely allies of the French against Germany. There was nothing inevitable about war, but the growing ambitions and fears of the Germans were reflected in the stepped-up building programme for U-Boats. In March 1911 four more, U.23-26 was ordered, then U.27-30 in February 1912, followed by II more, U.31-41, three months later. Only three more could be ordered before the outbreak of war, and out of these, U.42 would never fly the German ensign as she was building in an Italian yard when Italy declared war on Germany.
It has often been asked why Germany did not order more U-Boats before World War I, and the usual answer given is that Admiral Tirpitz and the other senior admirals were conservative and too obstinate to appreciate the tremendous potential of the new weapon. Unfortunately this view relies on hindsight, and ignores two incontrovertible facts. First, if the decision to expand the U-Boat strength had been made too early, say in 1909 or 1910 or even earlier, the design chosen would have been the unsuccessful U.3 or one of the "desiderata" types, and the Fleet would then have been burdened with large numbers of boats incapable of operating in the Atlantic. Second, the concentration of U-Boats building on the Germania Yard and the use of only two diesel-producers, Krupp and MAN, meant that the capacity to build U-Boats was very limited. Only three of the 18 U-Boats ordered between February 1912 and July 1913 were completed by the outbreak of war, and these were not ready to put to sea for another two months. The remainder would complete between the end of August 1914 and October 1915, which gives some idea of the time which had to elapse.
Strenuous efforts were made to provide more U-Boats, first by hurriedly placing orders for the remaining five of the U.43 Class, U.46-50 and then ordering the very similar U.51-56. But for the moment there were only 20 U-Boats available for war-service. U.I and U.2 were suitable only for training as were U.3 and U.4; the latter were assigned to coast defence in 1914-15 but later returned to training. The later boats, U.5-18, were not suitable for extended patrols, and only six of the big diesel-engined boats, U.19-24, were commissioned and fully operational, with U.25 and U.26 working up to full operational efficiency. It was a small enough force with which to start a war against the world's largest maritime power, but they were to bring about a startling change in naval thinking.

U.6, second of the series of "desiderata" boats ordered between 1908 and 1910 as prototypes. The plume of white smoke from her Korting oil-engine partially obscures the "Dreadnaught" behind her, demonstrating the drawback to this form of propulsion.

It was K/Lt Hersing in U.21 that scored the first success for a German Sub. On 2 September he managed to penetrate the Firth of Forth to see if he could attack any warships, and although spotted, made his escape. Three days later, on the afternoon of 5 September he found the small cruiser HMS Pathfinder off St Abb's Head with her flotilla of destroyers. It was typical of Hersing that he should ignore the fact that the rough sea was making U.21 plunge wildly and likely to reveal her presence by "porpoising" to the surface. The torpedo ran true and four minutes after being hit under the forward funnel, the little cruiser sank with 259 of her crew. The rough seas actually prevented the torpedo from being spotted, and for some days the Royal Navy was in some doubt as to the true cause.
The next blow struck by the U-Boats left no doubt at all about their capabilities. On 22 September at about 0630 hours the three elderly British armoured cruisers, Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue, were patrolling in line abreast, about two miles apart, when they were sighted by U.9. Her commander, K/Lt Otto Weddigen, was confused by the distortion of the lens of his periscope and mistook them for light cruisers of the Birmingham Class. Revenge for U.15, he said to his second-in-command, and it was not until he could study the stricken Aboukir as she slowly capsized, that he realised that his victim was in fact a 12,000-ton armoured cruiser, almost as big as a battleship. To his joy he now realised that the other two cruisers were stopping to lower boats, being under the impression that their sister-ship had struck a mine. This gave Weddigen the chance for a feat which is rarely permitted to a submariner, the consecutive bow- and stern-shot. Reloading the bow-tube which had been fired, he manoeuvred between The Hague and the Cressy, and sank first one and then the other in the space of five minutes. The Hague went down in five minutes, and the Cressy in 15 taking with them 62 officers and 1073 men.
The loss stunned the Royal Navy for it had been thought that the short, steep seas running would prevent a U-Boat from using her periscope. On 15 October Weddigen and U.9 were to deal one more blow to the complacency of the British when he encountered three old cruisers of the Northern Patrol east of Aberdeen. The cruisers did not make the mistake of the Aboukir, Cressy and Hague, and were altering their course and speed, and for some hours Weddigen was unable to work U.9 into a firing position. But suddenly and inexplicably, he saw that one of them was stopping to lower a boat, and seized his chance to fire a torpedo. His victim was the old cruiser Hawke, which had imprudently hove-to to pick up mail from her sister Endymian; she sank in eight minutes with the loss of 500 men.

The gun proved a useful weapon against solitary unarmed steamers, and in 1915 all operational U-Boats were given a gun varying from 88mm (3.5 inch) to I05mm (4.1 inches). Here a gun-crew fires the short-barrelled 88mm gun at sea; with no fire-control the shooting was usually poor, but at short range it was impossible to miss.



Above: An artist's impression of the triumphant return of Otto Weddigen's U.9 to Wilhelmshaven on 23 September 1914. The sinking of the three British armoured cruisers showed how vulnerable surface ships were to the U-Boat, and Weddigen's feat marks the beginning of a revolution in naval warfare which is still under way.



In 1916 the famous U.9 was relegated to training. After being surrendered in November 1918 she was condemned to be scrapped. While in tow from Harwich to Morecambe she broke adrift and grounded in shallow water at Dover, but was later re-floated to continue her last voyage.

The most spectacular of the unrestricted campaign was the sinking of the Cunard Liner Lusitania in April 1915, but in the long run it did the U-Boats little good. The boat involved was Schwieger’s U.20 which under her previous commander, K/Lt Droescher, had achieved the first trip around the British Isles as early as October 1914. So many stories, claims and counter claims have been made about the Lusitania that it will do no harm to sketch the outlines of Schwieger's patrol in U.20 he sailed from Wilhelmshaven on 30 April 1915, nego¬tiated the swept channels in the Heligoland Bight and ran on the surface through the North Sea to the Orkneys. North of these islands some Auxiliary Patrol craft were sighted and avoided, and on 4 May, four days after leaving harbour, U.20 reached her patrol area south of Ireland. Schwieger had been told to look out for troop¬ships arriving from Canada, but apart from that warning, had only routine orders to attack shipping; on 4 May he fired a torpedo at a steamer but missed and next day sank a sailing vessel with gunfire. On 6 May he sank two steamers, one by gunfire and the other by torpedo, but on the following day he decided to head for home as he was running low on fuel and had only two torpedoes left. He was off the Old Head of Kinsale that afternoon when he sighted smoke and funnels. At first he assumed that a flotilla of destroyers was passing and was prepared to lie low until they were clear, but an alteration of course revealed that the forest of funnels was really a big four-funnelled ship. It did not take much to persuade the keen U-Boat captain that the large ship was probably one of the troopships he had been warned to expect, and if not, an armed merchant cruiser, for most of the big pre-war liners had been requisitioned for one or the other of these duties. The Lusitania was, however, one of the very few British liners still running a scheduled transatlantic passenger service.
The argument that Schwieger should automatically have recognised the Lusitania is hardly valid, and the claim that the German High Command knew that she was carrying ammunition, and had given permission to Schwieger to sink her is ludicrous. The field of vision from the bridge of a U-Boat is very limited and the vision through a periscope even more restricted. Schwieger's report makes it clear that he had no idea of the name of the ship he was attacking and had very little time to make up his mind about attacking her. The claim that the ship was armed is so ridiculous that it cannot be seriously maintained, and in any case, for the reason already given, Schwieger could never have seen and counted guns unless he had been alongside the ship. The Lusitania had been given strengthened decks when built in 1907 for the purpose of mounting six-inch guns, as it was assumed that she would be required to serve as an armed merchant cruiser in wartime. However in August 1914 she, her sister Mauretania and the Aquitania were found to consume too much coal, and were returned to their owners after a month. As an armed merchant cruiser she would have worn the White Ensign and would not have carried passengers as all the accommodation would have been stripped; the nature of naval guns makes the theory that they could have been kept on board and only mounted when clear of American territorial waters impossible. Nor would she have been permitted to carry passengers while carrying large quantities of explosives. What she was carrying was a relatively small cargo (37 tons) of munitions, mostly nose-caps for shells and rifle ammunition, neither of them the sort of ordnance to cause a gigantic explosion. Much has been made of the speed with which the Lusitania sank after a single hit from a torpedo, and of a reported second explosion, but Schwieger him self thought that it was caused by the boilers, coal or ammunition. A single torpedo would be highly destructive to a liner with her numerous boiler-rooms, and cold seawater entering the red-hot boilers would cause a tremendous 'implosion', much more destructive than anything resulting from fuses and rifle cartridges. The giant liner sank within 20 minutes taking with her nearly 1200 passengers. Many of these were Americans, and although they were not the first US citizens to die in the unrestricted campaign, the magnitude of the tragedy roused American opinion. After a strongly worded protest from Washington, the Chancellor got a grudging promise from the Navy to spare passenger ships, and on 6 June orders to this effect were issued to the U-Boats. As a result of the intense diplomatic pressure, the number of ships torpedoed without warning dropped, and instead the U-Boats took to the gun. This proved to be much more effective as the figures for the monthly sinking’s show, and in August they reached the staggering total of 185,800 tons. The richest pickings were in the south-western approaches to the British Isles, and by August there were no fewer than three U-Boats stationed in that area, out of 13 at sea.

Lookouts dressed in Sou'Westers and Oilskins, exemplifies the dirt and misery of prolonged operations in bad weather. Although a U-Boat could escape the worst weather by diving, her hull soon became a damp and smelly prison for her crew.

The British answer to the growing number of attacks with gunfire was to arm merchantmen with light guns, and as a development of this idea they introduced the decoy ship, known as the Q-Ship. This was a harmless-looking vessel, sometimes even a sailing ship, with a naval crew and hidden armament; if attacked, her role was to lure the U-Boat within range and then sink her. The most sophisticated form of trap was to use a trawler to tow a submerged submarine as a counter to U-Boats attacks on fishing vessels off Aberdeen. However unlikely this ruse might sound, it caught U.40 in June 1915, and less than a month later U.23 was sunk the same way. In 1915 six U-Boats were sunk by decoys of one sort or another, and in many more actions the U-Boats only barely escaped. Not unnaturally, the use of decoys provided the U-Boats with justification for sinking ships on sight.

For more on Q-Ships from War44, click Here

Faced by a mounting chorus of criticism from neutrals about inhuman methods of waging warfare, the German High Command was eager to find corresponding evidence of British atrocities, and this was opportunely provided by the Baralong incident. On 19 August the liner Nicosian was stopped and shelled by U.27 about 100 miles south of Queenstown (Cobh). But the Nicosian's distress call had been picked up by the Q-Ship Baralong, which approached to within two-and-a-half miles before being sighted by U.27's lookouts. The decoy was flying the American flag, a legitimate ruse de guerre, and pretended to stop to pick up the Nicosian's boats. At this juncture K/Lt Wegener apparently decided to put U.27 between the stranger and the Nicosian. Suddenly, as U.27 came out from behind the Nicosian, the Baralong ran up the White Ensign and opened fire from her concealed guns; at 600 yards 34 rounds were fired, and U.27 was overwhelmed in a shower of shell hits. As she sank, about a dozen survivors (including Wegener) were left in the water, and these men swam towards the nearby Nicosian and began to climb aboard. The captain of the Baralong, Lieutenant-Commander Herbert, assumed that their intention was to seize any arms they could find, and try to scuttle the prize, and so he gave the order for them to be shot with small-arms fire. Even so, four German sailors escaped and disappeared below, and a boarding party of Royal Marines was told to recapture the ship. The four unfortunates, who probably had no intention but to surrender at the first opportunity were shot in the engine-room.
The affair could not be hushed up for American sailors from the Nicosian were interviewed by US newspapers on their return to the United States later that month. Immediately the German government demanded that Godfrey and the crew of the Baralong should be indicted for the murder of Wegener and his men. The British reply was to suggest that the Baralong affair could be referred to an international tribunal along with three other incidents which had occurred during the same 48 hours: the sinking of the liner Arabic (by U.24). the killing of a man in an open boat from the collier Ruel, and the killing of 15 men from the British submarine E.13 by gunfire from German torpedo-boats in Danish territorial waters. The offer was not taken up.


Arms and Armour Press.

An excellent history there Jim, enjoyed that, thanks.

Just to add that military historians have been excited in recent weeks by a chance find in the waters around the Orkneys. Two WWI subs have been found, believed to be U-92 and U-102.

"One of the subs it seems was commanded by quite a famous commander - the man who sank the ship that Lord Kitchener was on - so this is his watery grave so to speak."

Any road up, let you read, and watch, for yourself,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6172692.stm

Thanks Dave, just looking at the link, it is quite easy to make the U-Boats out on the sonar images. What a great find these are. I don't hold out much if they try to bring them up, thou it is not mentioned that they will try..