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War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict During World War II
War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict During World War II
War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict During World War II
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War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict During World War II

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Praise for War Beneath the Sea
"I am truly filled with awe and admiration...fascinating and a great contribution to the entire lore of submarines.... I wish I had written the book." ?Capt. Edward L. Beach, USN (Ret.) author of Run Silent, Run Deep

"Peter Padfield is the best British naval historian of his generation now working. [His] book...will now become the standard work on the subject." ?Daily Telegraph (London)

"Peter Padfield has produced by far the best and most complete critical history of the submarine operations of all the combatants in the Second World War, at the same time providing vivid narrative accounts of particular actions and events." ?Lloyd?s List (London)

"An excellent account of submarine warfare in 1939?45... [it] recreates the tribulations and horrors of that especially brutal form of warfare within a sturdily analytical and often critical framework." ?The Economist

"[A] marvelously complete and detailed study of World War II submarine warfare...an interesting, serious, and timely book." ?Houston Chronicle

"A brilliant submarine warfare study." ?Military Review

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2008
ISBN9780470342800
War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict During World War II

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Rating: 4.088235058823529 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I entered the submarine service less than two decades after the last World War ended and served on two submarines from that conflict. As such, I was familiar with the role of the United States submarine service in the Pacific. However, I was totally ignorant of the escapades of our allies and the Axis powers in the Pacific as well as in the European theater. This book filled in those gaps. I found it a compelling read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not too long a book - at 652 pages of which 10% is references etc. which I didn't read. However, this is a dense book and chock full of detail but, I must add, not a hard read.It covers the submarine campaigns of WWII and focuses on its main protagonists - certainly the Germans and understandably the most detail, the US mainly in the Pacific, the Brits mainly in the Med, the Indian/Pacific, and Norway, and less on the Japanese and the Italians. I wondered if I should read this book as the ground is well trod however, I am glad I did. Its scope is broad - the history and lead up to WWII, the equipment, the campaigns, strategies, the leaders, the men, and the action. relating to the latter - there was an awful lot of information on the actions - the patrols, the crews, and their victims and pursuers. A lot of attention was also paid to the political and military leadership that on all sides failed to realize the submarine potential and the military leaders who selfishly seeked to hinder the "silent services".I am very glad I read this and 'twas worthwhile and I certainly expanded my knowledge on the underwater campaigns which are central to the outcome of WWII.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Stands out for its broad coverage of both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres of war.

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War Beneath the Sea - Peter Padfield

1

Submarines and Submariners

The Submarine was a subversive force. Its ability to hide within the element on which the battlefleet held sway threatened the great ships, the theory and practice of their employment, above all the admirals who had risen in their service; during the 1920s and 1930s these held power and patronage, not simply in the Royal Navy where, for reasons of proud historic supremacy and incipient decline, it might have been expected, but also in those younger, thrusting navies of the United States, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan who looked to seize the trident. All these in the years leading to the Second World War cleaved to orthodoxy.

The articles of faith had been set down from 1890 by an American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, in a series of works extracting the principles of sea power from history – actually a period of history practically confined to the centuries of British naval ascendancy. Mahan placed the battlefleet at the core of naval strategy. By defeating the enemy battlefleet or bottling it up in port, the dominant fleet established ‘command’ of the oceans; and by blockading, that is throwing a cordon around the enemy’s coast, strangled his trade and brought him low. At the opposite pole to this strategy, and generally practised by the weaker naval power, was commerce-raiding, known after its French exponents as guerre de course. According to the doctrine this would never prevail over the superior battlefleet power.

The experience of the First World War appeared to confirm the theory. The British Grand Fleet had met the German High Seas Fleet off Jutland and driven it home, whence it had seldom ventured again, while the Royal Naval blockade had reduced the German population to near-starvation, anarchy and revolution. In the meantime, the German submarine or U-boat guerre de course had been contained.

Yet it had been a close-run thing. In April 1917 the British government had looked at defeat. That month, in which the United States entered the war against Germany, the Anglophile Admiral William Sims, despatched to liaise with the Admiralty in London, was horrified when shown the figures of merchant shipping losses: 536,000 tons sunk in February, 603,000 tons in March, 900,000 tons predicted for the current month. His dismay was heightened by a talk with the First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe.

‘It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue’, Jellicoe told him.

‘It looks as though the Germans are winning the war,’ Sims replied.

‘They will win unless we can stop these losses – and stop them soon.’

When Sims questioned him about a solution, he said that at present they could see absolutely none.¹

Towards the end of the month Jellicoe, believing the government had not grasped the full gravity of the situation, wrote a memo to his civilian chief, the First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that it was necessary to bring home to the War Cabinet ‘the very serious nature of the naval position’:

We are carrying on the war … as if we had the absolute command of the sea, whereas we have not such command or anything approaching it. It is quite true that we are masters of the situation so far as surface ships are concerned, but it must be realised – and realised at once – that this will be quite useless if the enemy’s submarines paralyse, as they do now, our lines of communication.²

He went on to suggest saving shipping space for the import of foodstuffs by withdrawing entirely from the Salonika campaign, and cutting down ruthlessly on all imports not essential to the life of the country,

but even with all this we shall be very hard put to it unless the United States help to the utmost of their ability … Without some such relief as I have indicated – and that given immediately – the Navy will fail in its responsibilities to the country and the country itself will suffer starvation.³

This crisis in the naval war did not disprove the doctrine of battlefleet command since the Admiralty had brought it on itself by misunderstanding and thus disregarding the simplest, time-honoured response to guerre de course: convoying merchant ships instead of allowing them to sail independently while attempting to hunt the raiders. Mahan himself had written:

the result of the convoy system … warrants the inference that, when properly systematised and applied, it will have more success as a defensive measure than hunting for individual marauders – a process which, even when most thoroughly planned, still resembles looking for a needle in a haystack.

In desperation, and in response to more thoughtful officers in the fleet, at the eleventh hour the Admiralty introduced convoys for oceanic trade. Almost at once the shipping haemorrhage eased. It should have been a lesson: at the height of the campaign that April there were on average less than 50 of Germany’s 128 operational U-boats at sea at any time.⁵ It was this handful of comparatively inexpensive war machines which had come within an ace of sinking the most powerful naval and trading empire, aided not simply by her maritime allies, France, Italy, Japan and finally the United States, but also by the shipping and shipyards of neutrals. After the convoy system was instituted it was American yards building ships faster than the U-boats could sink them that allowed the Allies to transport sufficient materials and troops to win the Continental war.

In November 1918, as Germany’s acceptance of the armistice conditions became known, one of the U-boat COs, OLt. Karl Dönitz, who had been captured after his boat surfaced out of control while he was attacking a convoy, was held aboard a British cruiser off Gibraltar. He was watching scenes of jubilation in nearby ships with a bitter heart, when he found the cruiser’s captain approaching. Dönitz gestured at the ensigns flying from the armada of ships in the roads, British, American, French and Japanese, and asked the Britisher if he could take any pleasure from a victory attained with the whole world as allies.

‘Yes, it’s very curious,’ the Captain replied thoughtfully.

A submarine was a thick-skinned steel cylinder tapering at both ends, designed to withstand enormous pressure at depth. Buoyancy chambers termed main ballast tanks, fitted in most cases as lozenge-shaped bulges outside this pressure hull on either side, kept the cylinder just afloat. An outer steel ‘casing’ liberally pierced with openings to let the sea flood in and out provided a sharp bow, a faired stern and a narrow deck atop the cylinder; only a few feet above the sea, this was washed in any weather like a half-tide rock. About midway along its length rose a low structure enclosing another small pressure chamber called the conning tower, accessible from the pressure hull via a circular hatch and allowing access to the bridge above it by another small, pressure-tight hatch.

To submerge, the diesel engines which drove the craft on the surface, sucking air in through ducts from the tower structure, were shut down, and electric motors which took their power from massed batteries and consequently used no air were coupled to the propeller shafts. Buoyancy was destroyed by opening valves in the main ballast tanks, allowing the trapped air to be forced out by sea water rushing in; and horizontal fins, termed hydroplanes or just planes, projecting either side at bow and stern were angled against the water flow caused by the boat’s progress to impel the bows down. Approaching the required depth as shown on a gauge in the control room below the conning tower, the diving officer attempted to balance the boat in a state of neutral buoyancy, ‘catching a trim’ in which they neither descended further nor rose. He did this by adjusting the volume of water in auxiliary tanks at bow and stern, and either side at mid-length, flooding or pumping out, aiming to poise the submarine so perfectly that she swam on an even keel weighing precisely the same as the space of sea she occupied, completely at one with her element and floating firm and free as an airship in the air. It was an art attained by minute attention to the detail of prior consumption of stores and fuel, and by much experience. Sea water is seldom homogenous; a boat passing into a layer of different temperature or salinity, and hence density, becomes suddenly less or more buoyant, dropping fast or refusing to descend through the layer until more tank spaces have been flooded; when going deep the pressure hull would be so squeezed between the ribs by the weight above that it occupied less space and the boat had to be lightened by pumping out tanks to compensate. Most vigilance was required at the extremes: going very deep the boat might plunge below the point at which the hull could withstand the pressure; near the surface at periscope depth she might porpoise up to break surface in sight of the enemy.

Submerged, a submarine stole along at walking pace or less, either to conserve her batteries which could not be recharged by diesels until she surfaced again or, when hunted, to make as little engine and propeller noise as possible. With both sets of batteries ‘grouped up’ in parallel she might make twice a fast walking speed, 8 or 9 knots, but only for some two hours at most before the batteries ran dangerously low. This was her shortcoming: while she had great range and speed on the surface, once submerged she lost mobility by comparison even with the slowest tramp steamer. Against a battle squadron she could not hope to get within range for attack unless already lying in ambush very close to its track. For this reason the submarine was held to be ‘a weapon of position and surprise’.

Once her presence was detected and she became the hunted her submerged endurance was limited by the amount of air within the pressure hull, which of course was all the crew had to breathe; as they exhaled it became progressively degraded with carbon dioxide, after twenty-four hours or so reaching dangerous and finally fatal levels. Headaches and dizziness were common in operational submarines, but they were accepted among the other discomforts of an exacting life; remarkably little was known of the speed of deterioration of air. It was, for example, not appreciated that when the carbon dioxide content reaches 4 per cent thinking becomes difficult and decisions increasingly irrational; by 10 per cent extreme distress is felt, followed soon after by unconsciousness; at over 20 per cent the mixture is lethal.⁷ No doubt this was not realized, and air purifiers were not installed – although in the German service individual carbon dioxide filter masks with neck-straps were provided – since before the advent of radar a submarine could usually surface at night to renew her air while remaining invisible. That indeed was the usual operational routine: to lurk submerged on the lookout for targets by day, coming up after nightfall to recharge the batteries, refresh the air and perhaps cruise to another position.

The submarine’s main armament was provided by torpedoes, each a miniature submarine in itself with a fuel tank and motor driving contra-rotating propellers, a depth mechanism actuating hydroplanes to maintain a set depth, and a gyro compass linked to a rudder to maintain a set course. At the forward end a warhead of high explosive was detonated by a mechanism firing on contact or when disturbed by the magnetic field of the target ship. These auto-piloted cylinders, known as fish or in the German service as eels, were housed in tubes projecting forward from the fore end of the pressure hull and often aft from the after end as well. In some classes two or more tubes were housed externally beneath the casing, but unlike the internal tubes from the pressure hull whose reloads were stowed in the fore and after compartments, external tubes could not be reloaded until return to base.

While devastating when they hit the soft underpart of a ship or exploded beneath her, torpedoes were neither as accurate as shells from guns, nor for several reasons could they be ‘spotted’ on to the target. They were launched from their tubes – after these had been opened to the sea – set to steer a collision course to a point ahead of the target ship, ideally at or near a right angle to her track. Whether they hit depended largely on whether the relative motion problem had been solved correctly, which before radar meant how accurately the target’s course and speed had been estimated. The most certain data available was the target’s bearing read from a graduated ring around the periscope. Range was obtained by reading the angle between the waterline and the masthead or bridge of the target, either from simple graduations of minutes of arc or by a split-image rangefinder built into the periscope optics. Using the height of the mast or whatever feature had been taken, the angle was converted into range by a sliding scale. Since in most cases the masthead heights had to be estimated from the assumed size or class of the target ship, usually a difficult judgement to make from quick periscope observations, and since there was a tendency to overestimate size, ranges were often exaggerated. In addition the observer made an estimate of the angle between the target ship’s heading and his own line of sight, known as ‘the angle on the bow’; this too was often overestimated. Speed was deduced from a count of the propeller revolutions audible through the submarine’s listening apparatus, the distance of the second bow wave from the stem, or simply from the type of vessel and experience. With this data a plot was started incorporating both the target’s and the submarine’s own movements; updated by subsequent observations as the attack developed, the plot provided increasingly refined estimates which were fed into computing devices of greater or less mechanical ingenuity according to the nationality of the submarine. In British and Japanese navies the firing solution was expressed as an aim-off or director angle (DA) ahead of the target, in the US and German navies as a torpedo-course setting. Finally, a salvo of two or usually more torpedoes was fired with an interval of several seconds between each; this was to avoid upsetting the trim with such a sudden release of weight as would result from the simultaneous discharge of all tubes, and to allow for errors in the estimated data or the steering of the torpedoes themselves. In the British service, where it was assumed that at least three hits would be required to sink a modern capital ship, COs were trained to fire a ‘massed salvo’ of all torpedoes – usually six – at 5-second intervals, so spreading the salvo along the target and its track. In the American and German services particularly, where the torpedoes themselves could be set to run the desired course, ‘spread’ was often achieved by firing a ‘fan’ with a small angle between each torpedo.

Few attacks were as straightforward as this description might imply: the target was generally steering a zigzag pattern; surface and air escorts were often present to force the submarine into evasive alterations during the approach. The periscope could be used only sparingly, the more so the calmer the sea, lest the feather of its wake were spotted by lookouts; and between observations the submarine CO had to retain a mental picture of the developing situation, continuously updating calculations of time, speed and distance in his head as he attempted to manoeuvre into position to catch the DA at the optimum time when the torpedoes would run in on a broad angle to the enemy’s track. There were other situations when snap judgements had to be made on a single observation or while the submarine was turning with nothing but the CO’s experience and and eye to guide him. It was sometimes said that a successful CO needed a sportsman’s eye. Like most generalizations about submarine COs, this can be disproved by individual example: David Wanklyn, for instance, the highest-scoring British ace, did not shine at ball games.

Some British COs appear to have dispensed with overmuch calculation: John Stevens, the very successful CO of Unruffled in the Mediterranean, remarked, ‘I say if the target’s worth firing at, give him the lot [a full salvo] and, anyway, the DA is always ten degrees.’⁸ It is not possible to compare the results of this cavalier approach statistically with those of American or German COs who relied on fire-control computers generating continuous solutions since the three services operated in very different conditions and, particularly with the Americans, the percentage of hits was depressed by torpedo failures. All that can be deduced from the figures is that all navies had a few COs who consistently outhit the average, and at the other end of the scale a few who seldom hit anything. The qualities the aces showed were aggression, determination, imperturbability in attack, and painstaking attention to training. To a greater extent than in any other type of warship, officers and crew were simple extensions of the CO’s will. When he attacked submerged, he alone saw the enemy – apart from some US submarines where the executive officer took the periscope – and it was the CO’s coolness, resolve and daring, or his timidity, exhaustion and nervous fatigue, that decided the course of the action.

The submarine, more than any other warship, was designed and operated as what would now be called a weapon system. Except in the US service, no concessions were made to the comfort or even the convenience of the crew. They were carried merely to serve the system, fitting in the spaces around the reload torpedoes and stores for the voyage, in most cases sharing bunks, ‘hot bunking’ with a shipmate from another watch and sleeping on unchanged sheets that became dirtier by the day. They were unable to bathe or shower, scarcely to wash hands and face, and frequently could not get dry after a wet spell on watch. There was often a queue for the fiendishly complex WC in the heads, and even that could not be used when submerged below about 70 feet because of the exterior pressure. Thereafter they were obliged to relieve themselves in buckets and empty bottles whose smell mixed with the confined, humid odour of diesel oil, past cooking, unwashed bodies, chlorine and stale bilges which permeated every area. They were forced to eat hashes of tinned food and dehydrated vegetables after the fresh provisions ran out, could not take proper exercise, could not even walk on the deck casing lest an enemy aircraft were sighted and the boat had to make an emergency dive; and when submerged for any length of time they were subject to nausea, splitting headaches and, if the mind were allowed to dwell on it, incipient claustrophobia. Paradoxically, the sheer frightfulness of conditions and the sense of vulnerability, and hence of mutual responsibility, engendered comradeship across barriers of rank which in turn ensured high morale, probably higher than in any other class of warship, irrespective of nationality. It depended, however, on a good CO; this meant above all an officer who, whatever his qualities or faults, the men felt they could trust.

It was a young man’s game. In the British service an officer was judged too old for operational command at 35. The US service began the war with COs for fleet submarines nearer 40 than 35 but many proved over-cautious, which may have had more to do with unrealistic peacetime training than with age; they were soon replaced by younger officers whose aggression, helped by radar, was largely responsible for the devastating campaign which severed Japan from its external supplies. By the last year of the war most US submarine COs were in their early thirties, many not yet 30. In the German service a more dramatic decline in the age of COs was due to the loss of men in the Atlantic and the simultaneous expansion of the U-boat fleet; in the later years many German COs were under 25; youngest of all was Hans Hess, who was 21 when he took command of U995 in 1944.

Who in sound mind volunteered for the hazards of such an unnatural life? Before the war sufficient came forward in all navies, and it was only necessary to draft a few, mostly specialist ratings. Some would insist they joined for the extra allowance paid for service in submarines, or because they needed the extra money to get married. There were other powerful inducements: for officers, especially, responsibility and command came much earlier than in the surface fleet; for all hands there was the special camaraderie and informality of the close life aboard, and a different kind of discipline, maintained more by competence and self-respect than by mere rank. In a submarine more than in any other type of vessel each member of the crew was vital to the team; a mistake by any one person might lead to disaster. It was in every sense a close fraternity with all the certainties and reassurance of such, bonded by shared trials, miseries, unique hazards and proficiency in overcoming them. In every navy the submarine service was a club apart with a particular esprit de corps, attracting the bright and non-conformist seeking escape from the hierarchy and meaningless apple-polishing of a big-ship navy in peacetime. The future German aces, Prien, Schepke and Kretschmer, were of this type, as was the American submarine CO Ignatius Galantin, who wrote of his two years’ battleship service after graduating from the Naval Academy: ‘I became increasingly restive … I wanted to be free of the dull, repetitious, institutionalised life of the battleship navy, and to be part of a more personalised, more modern and flexible sea arm.’

As Galantin hints, the submarine was exciting as a new weapon at the forefront of naval technology and strategy. On the other hand it had retained from the first war the aura of clandestine, piratical operations by such COs as Martin Dunbar Nasmith, who had forced the nets, minefields and powerful currents of the Dardanelles to attack Turkish transports for Gallipoli in the Sea of Marmora; Max Horton, whose exploits in the Baltic had led the Germans to put a price on his head; and from the other camp Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, ‘ace of aces’, whose record of ships and tonnage sunk remains unbeaten, and Dönitz’s first CO, Walter Forstmann, who stands only a little below Arnauld in the record book.

One of the distinguished band of British submariners (now Vice-Admiral Sir) Ian McGeoch has listed his reasons for volunteering:

I was a dedicated small boat sailor, and navigator in offshore racing yachts; I was keen to get the early command which submarine service offered; I was engaged to be married, so that the extra six shillings per diem was an attraction; and I had read most of the accounts of the operations of British submarines in WWl.¹⁰

In both Germany and Japan, where youthful idealism was harnessed to a martial ethic, the submarine arms were deliberately raised to elites, their image enhanced by propaganda; in Germany posters depicted dashing U-boat heroes sailing under streaming pennants towards the enemy. Despite this, during the war both Germany and Japan, while attempting to maintain the fiction of an all-volunteer service, resorted increasingly to drafting suitable young men from the surface fleet, as indeed happened in Great Britain and America. But even when drafted, by no means all measured up to the physical and temperamental demands of submarine life. In all navies the submarine branch remained an élite of fit, stable young men from which temperamental misfits and those not prepared to pull their weight were very quickly weeded, or weeded themselves.

2

Towards the Second World War

The Submarine did not change between the wars; it simply developed in small ways from its forerunners in the first war, yet there were distinct differences between the national fleets. These had less to do with differing national requirements than with a shared misunderstanding of the role and strategic potential of the weapon by the gunnery admirals at the top, aggravated by the distorting effects on design of naval limitation treaties.

The Royal Navy’s policy can only be described as one of wilful blindness. As guardians of the greatest merchant fleet and volume of external trade, and an empire bound by sea routes, British admirals had recognized the danger of the submarine from its beginnings, and wanted to outlaw it. Nevertheless, they had taken care to develop the arm, if only to be able to devise countermeasures. After the shocking experience of April 1917 when it had seemed their worst fears were about to be realized, the policy became a parody. At the Washington Conference of 1922, called by the United States to prevent a naval building race, the British delegation sought to have submarines banned; when this failed they persuaded the other delegates to sign a declaration not to use them, as U-boats had been used, for an unrestricted war on merchant shipping – although this section was never ratified by France.

The Washington Treaty formalized the end of Great Britain’s naval supremacy. It had been implicit from at least the turn of the century with the growth of Germany, the United States and Japan as industrial and naval powers. The colossal debt run up in the First World War finally ended any possibility of Britain maintaining a world-wide navy able to take on all comers; in her weakened condition she could not have matched the United States alone in a building competition. She had no option but to agree to an American limitation proposal whereby the United States, Great Britain and Japan – since the defeat of Germany the three major naval powers – accepted a ratio of 5:5:3 in capital ship tonnage. This faced her with the prospect – in the early 1920s apparently remote – of finding herself inferior to Japan in the Far East if challenged at the same time by an enemy in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean; logically she could now deploy the arguments of the lesser battlefleet powers, France and Italy, who were building submarines intended to whittle down a larger enemy fleet to a size at which their own might meet it in battle.

It would be unreasonable to expect that admirals nurtured in a period of British supremacy on a Nelsonic legend of offence and success against all odds would or could have adapted their attitude to such very different conditions. In any case, baulked in their aim of abolishing beastly submarines, they experimented with eccentric ideas for equipping them with heavy guns or seaplanes, or building huge submersible ‘cruisers’, meanwhile protecting capital ships with underwater anti-torpedo ‘bulges’ and developing a submarine detection system pioneered in 1917 by the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee. The apparatus, known from the acronym of the committee as asdic, sent out pulses of ultra-sonic sound waves in a cone-shaped beam which could be trained in any direction under water; echoes reflected back from dense objects were picked up and the time elapsed since transmission of the pulse converted into range. Thus not only could submarines be discovered up to a mile or so away, but their range and bearing could also be plotted, though not their depth in the early stages of an attack. In theory the apparatus could be used by submarines themselves to locate and attack surface ships from below periscope depth; as it was also developed as a discreet means of underwater communication known as SST (sub-sonic transmission), it was fitted in both destroyers and submarines. Besides asdic, all submarines were fitted with arrays of listening heads termed hydrophones to detect the presence and bearing of other vessels from their engine and propeller noise.

Despite the sense of security derived from asdic, and presumably also from the Washington Treaty outlawing unrestricted war on merchant ships, the Sea Lords and the British government continued to press for the abolition of submarines at the London Naval Conferences of both 1932 and 1935, without success; indeed by the latter meeting Japan had withdrawn from international limitations of any kind, and Germany, formerly prevented from possessing submarines by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, had launched a new U-boat arm. The first London Treaty did, however, set limits for the western navies, who agreed not to exceed Great Britain’s total submarine tonnage of 52,700, nor to build individual boats over 2,000 tons (standard surface) displacement.

Meanwhile the Admiralty had ordered two distinct new types, both revealing an obsession with battlefleet doctrine: one of these, the O class, followed by improved versions, Ps and Rs, was intended to hold the ring on the outbreak of war with Japan – by this time considered more than a possibility – until units of the fleet in the Mediterranean or home waters could reach the Far East. The other, River class, marked a revival of the concept of submarines sufficiently fast to work with the battlefleet. The original attempts at this idea during the first war had resulted in a disastrous, steam-powered K class. The idea was fundamentally misconceived: a few hours on a tactical board would have shown that once submerged on contact with the enemy, the chances of the boats working into a favourable position for torpedo attack would have been remote. This was all the more surprising considering the general view of the submarine as a weapon of position and surprise.

In the final years of peace a new type was designed to replace the O, P and R classes, which suffered many technical problems, not least a tendency, which would prove fatal in war, to leak oil from external tanks. Although international limitation was dead before the first of the new boats was laid down, the specifications were drawn up before the 1935 London Naval Conference, when the Admiralty hoped – if they failed to ban submarines altogether – at least to reduce the total tonnage allowed each country to 45,000 tons. Hence, instead of specifying boats of comparable size and speed to the classes they were to replace, or building up to the 2,000-ton individual limit, the Admiralty opted for a boat of 1,000 tons. The figure was picked chiefly, it seems, to obtain a greater number of boats within the overall tonnage limit they hoped to negotiate. In such a negative spirit the T class was born. The boats had one very positive feature, a bow salvo of ten torpedoes. Six tubes opened from the forward end of the pressure hull, two from a bulbous casing above and two more faced forward under a raised deck at mid-length. This gave the boats the most powerful forward battery of any submarine in the world, at least in theory; the intention was to increase the chances of scoring a sufficient number of hits to sink a highly compartmented modern capital ship. However, the four external tubes could not be reloaded at sea, nor could their torpedoes be inspected and serviced; consequently they were not so dependable as those in the internal tubes, especially over a long patrol. Moreover, the bulge of deck casing necessary to accommodate the forward external tubes caused difficulties with trim and raised a visible bow wave at periscope depth. To correct these faults in a second series laid down after the outbreak of war, the external bow tubes were moved 7 feet aft and the bow casing was fined down. And to give the boats greater flexibility in attack, a single external torpedo tube was added beneath the casing at the stern, and the two tubes at either side amidships were turned to face aft. This still left a powerful bow salvo of eight torpedoes but it did nothing to mitigate the inherent disadvantages of external tubes. Nor did it improve the shape of the casing, whose undulation over the external tubes created considerable ‘drag’, adversely affecting the underwater speed.

To avoid the technical problems that had plagued their predecessors, the machinery of the T class was designed for simplicity, reliability and ease of maintenance rather than outstanding performance, a decision that proved itself in the war. Nevertheless, by choosing an arbitrary tonnage figure half the permitted size the Admiralty had sacrificed range, habitability in the tropical seas for which the class was intended, weight of armament and surface speed – which in any case they regarded as unimportant in a weapon of position: maximum speed was scarcely over 15 knots, and only six reload torpedoes were carried. As it turned out this perverse policy did not have the dire effects it deserved: the Ts were chiefly employed in the Mediterranean, where their comparatively small size, quick diving time, ruggedness and handiness under water suited the conditions; they only wanted speed to be ideal.

The other new type to emerge just before the outbreak of war was the U class. Designed as unarmed boats to train surface forces in anti-submarine work and to provide young officers with their first command, these were under 550 tons standard surface displacement. With war imminent, they were equipped with four internal and two external bow torpedo tubes, but the bulbous casing this necessitated produced the same problems as experienced with the T-class boats, and when a full salvo was fired it proved scarcely possible to prevent the bow broaching the surface. In consequence, after the first three boats the external tubes were omitted; the bulbous bow casing was retained nevertheless in six boats of a second series laid down after the outbreak of war – including what was to become the most famous of all British submarines, Upholder – and this made them difficult to hold to a trim at periscope depth. The later boats without the raised bow casing were beautiful to handle.

The U-class boats were the first British submarines to employ diesel-electric drive, as pioneered in the US service since the 1920s. The main diesels drove generators which supplied current to electric motors coupled to the two propeller shafts, or of course charged the batteries which supplied power to the motors for submerged running. The system provided a degree of flexibility both for the internal design and for operation. The boats were intended to make 7 knots submerged and 12 knots on the surface, but few reached that speed and they were by far the slowest boats, apart from midgets, used by any navy in the war. They could get under the surface in under 20 seconds, however, faster than any other submarine, and in the war they proved well suited to the confined waters of the Mediterranean.

Besides these two classes which emerged in the nick of time, an earlier S class designed for patrol work in the North Sea also proved a success in action. The original series laid down in the early 1930s were of 670 tons standard surface displacement and had six bow torpedo tubes and six reload torpedoes. An improved series laid down after the outbreak of war were of 715 tons and were equipped with an additional single torpedo tube at the stern. Like the T and U classes, the S-class boats were deficient in speed, making only 14 knots on the surface. All three types mounted a small calibre quick-firing gun forward of the conning tower for surface action.

Most peacetime exercises with submarines were necessarily unrealistic. Night surface attack was not practised since against battle groups, virtually the only targets foreseen, the risk of collision with darkened screening destroyers was too great. By day, practice torpedoes were seldom actually discharged in a massed salvo; instead the number of probable hits – if any – was determined by analysis of the CO’s estimates of target course, speed and range as signalled when he made his dummy attack. One of his chief concerns on these occasions was to make the approach to effective range, some 1,000 yards, without being detected by the asdic-equipped escorts, to which end he tried to keep bows on to the nearest vessel in the screen. This natural preoccupation with asdic appears to have diverted attention from the highly sensitive hydrophone arrays developed by the Germans for anti-submarine craft, and it was only as a result of war experience that the need for complete silence in boats in contact with the enemy was realized.

Regarded in the surface fleet chiefly as ‘clockwork mice’ to train fleet destroyers in submarine detection, inhibited by the artificial conditions of peacetime exercises and too often dogged by mechanical troubles, the submarines’ positive potential was seriously neglected. And so little were the exigencies of real war patrols imagined that it was to take the loss of several boats in the first months of the war before notes based on First World War experience were hurriedly compiled and issued as guidance for patrolling at night. In the Mediterranean and the Far East flotilla commanders exercised their boats as mobile patrol groups, using flag signals, radio and asdic to manoeuvre, often in close order on the surface, and practised exciting close-range gun-layers’ firing. As developed in the 4th Submarine Flotilla in China, this involved each boat putting ten rounds into a 10-foot square target at 600 yards range in a minute, starting with the boat invisible below the surface and ending with it once again submerged. The gunnery officer attached to the flotilla between 1936 and 1938 has described this remarkable evolution:

they’d approach putting their periscope up and down and they’d get the range and the speed of the target, and they’d get within 600 yards, then say ‘Stand by for gun action!’ … all the gun’s crew would be ready in the conning tower [or gun tower just forward], then … they’d pop up. And while the conning tower [and gun tower] was still under water they’d open the hatch, and the air pressure blew the gun’s crew out. They’d fire their ten rounds and they’d all scramble back again, and I’m not exaggerating when I say they invariably got full marks by getting ten shots in this target and disappearing within a minute. And it was all done by the gunlayer … they knew exactly what they were going to do – the bearing would be green nine oh – they’d got this on the periscope – the range would be 600 yards, and as soon as they got there they’d just open fire.¹

It was huge fun and an excellent drill for keeping the crews on their toes, but it was hardly preparation for war against fast enemy fleets. Thoughtful young officers pressed for more realistic training. Lt. Ian McGeoch, serving in the fleet submarine Clyde in the Mediterranean, submitted a paper to the flotilla staff arguing that they should practise firing torpedoes at night. He was convinced that the submarine’s small silhouette gave it an advantage in night surface attack, and pointed out that in any case unless they did try night firing they would never find out if their night torpedo sights were any good. He had not seen the night-sights in the Clyde used.² Nothing came of the proposal; British night-sights remained crude by comparison with others, especially those of the Germans.

Torpedo and gun fire control was similarly neglected. The Royal Navy had led the way in developing computers for gunnery fire control before the First World War, but no such drive went into torpedo firing. The CO had only the navigator’s plot and a multi-disc calculator known as the Is-Was as aids to determine the director angle he should allow. The Is-Was was upgraded into a mechanical submarine torpedo director, known as the fruit machine, but still this only provided solutions valid for the instant of observation; it did not produce a running picture of the attack, as a machine adapted from the surface navy’s gunnery fire-control table might have done, and as US and German torpedo fire-control computers did. These latter also set the gyro compasses of the individual torpedoes which took up the set course after being launched from their tubes. British torpedoes had no such angling device; as in the first war, COs aimed the whole submarine along the firing track. Cdr. William King described this in his classic account of one man’s submarine war, The Stick and the Stars:

To fire … you had to point the submarine like a bow and arrow. It needed a virtuoso to do it well, and in mock attacks I had learnt how often I lacked brilliance … If war came – would I be any good? … for the artistry required to attack with a submarine was not to be acquired by merely trying hard.³

British submarines had another disadvantage in attack: their periscopes were made not of steel but of bronze – in order not to affect the magnetic compass in the conning tower – and hence could not bear the same unsupported length as the steel periscopes fitted in the submarines of other navies, who perhaps placed more faith in gyro compasses. The periscope depth being shallower by as much as 10 to 16 feet, British boats were more subject to surface swell, hence more difficult to control and more liable to break surface at critical moments in an attack. Solicitude for the magnetic compass also cost British submarines diving depth since conning towers were likewise built of bronze, which added extra weight by comparison with steel construction, and this was paid for by thinner plating for the pressure hull, little over half an inch compared with three-quarters to seven-eighths of an inch in German and US boats.

The Royal Navy’s dismissive attitude to its submarine arm was only exceeded by its neglect of the necessary protection for merchant shipping against submarine – and indeed air – attack. Undoubtedly faith in asdic played its part. By 1935, when the prospect of a new German U-boat arm had become reality, the Admiralty was confident that asdic had ‘virtually extinguished the submarine menace’.⁴ And in 1937 the departing First Lord, Sir Samuel Hoare, reassured the House of Commons that ‘the submarine is no longer a danger to the security of the British Empire’.⁵ Yet asdic had a maximum range in reasonable conditions of 2,500 yards (1¼ miles), much less than the range of torpedoes, and average range actually achieved by asdic was just over half this, 1,300 yards.⁶ Moreover, the instrument went blind within 200 yards or so of a submerged submarine, allowing submarine COs to move aside from the track in the vital final moments of the approach and while the stern-launched depth-charges sank to the level at which they had been set to explode. Development of ahead-thrown charges which would reduce the effect of this blind period was halted by financial constraints.

But apart from these technical considerations, where were the vessels which were to carry asdic and depth-charges to protect ocean-going merchant convoys? There were none. Destroyers, the submarine’s chief enemy, had been designed to protect the battlefleet and deliver massed torpedo attacks on the enemy fleet at the next ‘Jutland’ against the Japanese; they lacked the necessary endurance. The former First Sea Lord, Jellicoe, had warned after the first war and again in a book published in 1932 that fast ocean escorts could not be improvized hurriedly; yet this is what the Admiralty proposed, and what finally they were forced into doing too late. Moreover, no exercises in the protection of slow convoys of merchant ships took place during the inter-war years.

Another fatal flaw in the Admiralty’s asdic-induced complacency was the assumption that enemy submarines would only deliver submerged attacks; for asdic was powerless to detect a submarine on the surface. In 1918 half the U-boat attacks on merchant shipping – in the Mediterranean over half – had been made on the surface at night.⁸ Furthermore, as has been noted, thinking British submariners advocated night attack. In 1938, after his failure to move the Mediterranean submarine staff, Lt. McGeoch wrote a paper – which in the event he was not allowed to publish – attempting to demonstrate the offensive value of the modern submarine; it contained a short section on the submarine’s ‘very important tactical capability … [for] surface night attack’.⁹ The new German U-boat arm was trained from the start in night surface attack, and in early 1939 its inspirational commander, Kapitän Karl Dönitz, published a book in Berlin obligingly describing the submarine’s advantages in night surface attack.¹⁰

Correlli Barnett, in his account of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, has deemed the Admiralty’s neglect until too late of ‘the enormous operational and quantitative problems’ of setting up a convoy system of defence against U-boats their most serious failure of judgement in the inter-war years; he lays the blame on ‘the want of organised, scientifically conducted operational research. No such department was set up by the Admiralty until 1942.’¹¹ More surprisingly, even naval staff histories stopped short of the final years of the first war and the near-fatal unrestricted U-boat campaign. This was because the Treasury clamped down on further research and writing in 1925. Whether senior Admiralty civil servants connived at this because, as D.W. Waters has argued, they regarded well-informed naval officers as a threat to their own indispensability in policy-making is not for debate here; what is clear is that no Admiralty official or naval officer between the wars had either data or analysis on which to base a strategy of trade protection in the submarine era. Such statistics as were available were buried in the generally uninformative fifth volume of the official History of Naval Operations, and in two volumes of the official Air Ministry history – aircraft having been a vital factor in anti-submarine warfare – which latter were not published until 1934 and 1937.

In view of the terrifyingly narrow margin by which Great Britain had avoided defeat at the hands of U-boats in 1917 it seems scarcely credible that no systematic examination and analysis of the U-boat campaign was carried out between the wars, but such was the case.¹² No doubt the failure, which itself has never been properly explained, had many causes, among them perhaps the final triumph of the Royal Navy erasing the memory of catastrophe, perhaps the specialized training or indoctrination of naval officers from a very early age, certainly the Admiralty’s reluctant, haphazard and tardy development of modern staff work; as the historian H.P. Willmott has put it, ‘the interwar RN … lacked the institutional structure and the sympathy to accommodate those [with first war experience] who might have provided it with a knowledge and understanding of ASW [anti-submarine warfare]’.¹³

In mitigation Willmott has pointed out that the inter-war years were dominated by economic retrenchment – he might have added that the sentiment of peace prevailed throughout the land – and there was no enemy in view: ‘The threats posed by Germany in general and U-boats in particular emerged very late indeed, not until 1938–39’, and ‘any attempts to have built up British anti-submarine forces before the last couple of years prior to the outbreak of war would have been for both the nation and the navy financially irresponsible and strategically irrelevant.’¹⁴ This leaves out of account the threat posed to British Far Eastern shipping by Japan through the 1930s, and the concessions made to the new German U-boat arm in the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935.

However that may be, it is undeniable that the Admiralty as an organization shrugged off the most humiliating reverse in its history and simply lost the anti-submarine lessons of 1917–18. The causes surely run deeper than reason. Ultimately, so little thought was invested in trade protection not because so little money was available, as it was, nor because there was no immediate enemy on the doorstep, although there was, nor, as Paul Kennedy has argued,¹⁵ because the Admiralty necessarily lacked the gift of prophecy – although they might perhaps have employed the gift of imagination – but simply because merchant shipping lacked glamour or promotion prospects. Much the same went for submarines. Naval officers rose, as in all large organizations, by aggressive ambition, ability, social compatibility and adaptability to the aims of the service, not usually through independent or unorthodox thought; indeed the services aversion to cerebral activity was as legendary as its assumption of supremacy. Officers showing a bent for technical innovation or historical or lateral thought were too often written off as theorists, in the jargon ‘x-chasers’ trying to ‘blind [their seniors] with science’. Not that the proud heirs of Nelson did much worse in trade protection than their counterparts in other major navies, indeed they eventually did better. Yet understandable in human and organizational terms, the failures of the inter-war Boards of Admiralty were so grave in their consequences and so potentially disastrous that they merit the judgement made by Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton, one of the most distinguished escort commanders of the war: ‘We were criminally unprepared for the Battle of the Atlantic in 1939.’¹⁶ In effect the country was left wide open to defeat by submarine blockade, a defeat from which it was only saved by science in the shape of radar, the folly of its principal enemy, the productive power of its principal ally and the ingenuity and resolve of unorthodox officers bypassed for promotion.

The United States Navy was as focused on the next great fleet battle, also against the Japanese, as the Royal Navy. It was similarly heedless of the lessons of the first war U-boat campaign, and when impelled into the second war at the end of 1941 even disregarded the lessons the Royal Navy had been relearning painfully since 1939. Nevertheless, in the design of submarines the US Navy did very much better.

They had sought a submarine fast enough to work tactically with the battlefleet since before the first war; a prototype had been authorized in 1914, but delays in design and construction held up her completion until 1920, by which date she was obsolescent. Standard 800-ton S-class submarines in service proved far too small and unreliable to work with the fleet over the vast distances of the Pacific, and consequently another design of ‘fleet’ boat, designated V1, was laid down. The three boats of this class were of some 2,000 tons surface displacement and borrowed several features, although not the overall concept, from U-boats obtained as prizes of victory in the war; however, when commissioned between 1924 and 1925 they proved a disappointment in practically every department. Following them the US Navy had a brief fling with very large submarines of 2,700 tons, the first for minelaying, the next two as submersible ‘cruisers’, each mounting two 6-inch guns. Before they were completed, dissatisfaction within the submarine arm about the performance of the S class and the new fleet boats, and the slow pace and apparent misdirection of development led to the formation of the Submarine Officers’ Conference. Designed as a forum for discussion, the Conference brought together serving officers and technical experts from the Bureaux of Construction and Engineering to provide precisely the sort of thinking and co-ordinating body that the Royal Navy’s submarine arm so conspicuously lacked. Results were immediate: out went the idea of fleet submarines and the flirtation with great size, and in their place came the concept of a moderate-sized boat for independent offensive operations, what would later be called a patrol submarine with the emphasis on manoeuvrability, habitability, reliability of machinery and economy in mass production.¹⁷

The result was a 1,500-ton boat, V7, later named the Dolphin. After her there was a brief regression to a class of smaller boats modelled on the first war German U-cruiser, U135, but in retrospect the Dolphin can be seen as the first in the true line of evolution of the formidable submarines which fought the Pacific war. They were developed through a series of similar classes from 1933 when the new United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, presided over a naval expansion programme designed for the twin purposes of responding to Japanese military aggression in east Asia and mass unemployment at home. The Submarine Officers’ Conference was the essential mechanism through which development was guided; and if there was a single officer whose contribution was vital it was Cdr. Charles Lockwood, first as a representative of serving submariners while commanding a division of the latest boats, and from 1938 as Chairman of the Conference.

By 1939 the type had evolved. The Tambor class laid down that year incorporated practically every feature, bar radar, of the mature US wartime submarine. Of almost 1,500 tons surface displacement, they had the high, flat-sided, shark’s-nose bow – derived from first war U-boats – the long sweep of deck in a straight line to the stern, and the low conning-tower structure placed rather forward of mid-length that distinguished all later fleet submarines, as they continued to be called despite the changed emphasis to independent operations. Powered by four diesel engines serving as generators to supply power to electric motors driving the twin propeller shafts, they could make 20 knots on the surface, or could cruise 11,000 miles at 10 knots. They were armed with twenty-four torpedoes for six bow and four stern tubes and mounted one 3-inch gun designed for high-angle or surface fire. They were painted black overall.

The superiority of these boats to the British T class designed at about the same time for the same area of operations against the same enemy was so marked as to render them a different species altogether. The extra 500 tons displacement allowed an advantage of at least 5 knots top surface speed, over 6,000 miles range at cruising speed and a payload of twenty-four instead of sixteen torpedoes, although the British boats, as noted, had the heavier initial salvo. Internally the crew accommodation, including a well-equipped galley, a separate mess room with mess tables apart from the sleeping quarters, and showers in the heads, was of a standard impossible to obtain on the smaller British boats. They also enjoyed air-conditioning. Older naval officers sniffed at ‘hotel accommodation’, but air-conditioning was a practical measure, not a luxury. Without it the temperature in a submerged boat quickly rose over 100° F and, with 100 per cent humidity causing the cold outer plating to sweat copious streams, the electrical machinery especially suffered and became liable to faults. The effects on health and alertness were if anything more dangerous, particularly if extended over a long war patrol in enemy waters where most of the days had to be spent submerged. Although the air-conditioning neither absorbed excess carbon dioxide nor added oxygen to the depleted atmosphere, it did filter out grease and other impurities which contributed to the headaches and nausea suffered below and helped to prevent heat exhaustion.

As mentioned, US boats had the great advantage of an advanced electro-mechanical torpedo data computer, or TDC, which provided a continuous display of the relative positions of target and submarine, together with a running solution to the torpedo angle problem, and in addition kept the gyro compasses of each torpedo in its tube set to this continually changing course, allowing the CO to fire at any time from any heading he happened to be steering. Fleet boats were also fitted with ultra-sonic transducer echo-receiver instruments like the British asdic; in the US service this was known as sonar; the sonar head was usually mounted on a retractable shaft poking down below the forward torpedo room, and it occasionally suffered from inadvertent grounding.

These large fleet submarines provided the US Navy with an awesomely effective submersible fighting ship; and while it was inferior to the German U-boat in specific areas, particularly optics, diesels and pressure-hull construction for deep diving, in the wide ocean spaces for which it was designed the US fleet submarine outmatched other powers’ boats as once Dreadnought battleships had outmatched pre-Dreadnoughts. Besides their evident advantages in performance, they were mechanically reliable – after initial engine failures had been remedied – and proved astonishingly robust under depth-charge attack, the result not only of pressure-hull design and construction, but also of painstaking testing of individual components by underwater explosion, redesigning where weaknesses were exposed. In diving time they almost equalled the smaller British T class; with the help of a down-express tank kept flooded while on the surface, fleet boats could submerge to periscope depth in 35 seconds. Once down, they handled well and had a submerged maximum speed of 10 knots, almost equal to the top surface speed of the British U class.

There were several other factors contributing to the US Navy’s success in out-designing other powers. The Submarine Officers’ Conference has been mentioned and was obviously vital. The lack of class differentiation between engineer and executive officers, who shared a common entry and grounding at the Naval Academy – a system the great British First Sea Lord, ‘Jacky’ Fisher, had tried to establish in the Royal Navy before the first war – played a part. Underpinning the whole effort was the industrial and technologically buoyancy of the country: the US Navy’s advantage over the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Royal Navy in this respect was most marked in electrical and radio engineering, perhaps accounting for their lead in fire-control computers.¹⁸ In diesel engineering, a field in which they had lagged at the start, the US Navy worked in partnership with companies producing lightweight diesels for the railroads and, gradually assuming the role of ‘catalyst, planner and director’ came eventually to drive US locomotive engine development for the benefit of the submarine arm.¹⁹

With hindsight it appears that in the fleet submarine the US Navy had by 1939 a potential war winner which needed only to be produced in sufficient numbers and deployed scientifically against Japan’s weakest link, its merchant shipping, to strangle that island empire’s ambitions in short time before the immense human and material toll of the greater Pacific war, certainly before the atom bomb. That this was not realized was due to strategic, tactical and technological failures.

The strategic error which the US shared with all major navies was of course an obsession with battleships and the great fleet battle for command of the sea. This was enshrined from before the first war in Plan Orange for war against Japan; after the decisive fleet battle, the US Navy would blockade the Japanese islands much as the Royal Navy had blockaded its enemies during its centuries of supremacy. Had there been a proper analysis in the light of the first war U-boat campaign against British merchant shipping, it would have been noted that Japan was even more dependent on imports by sea than Great Britain, that her merchant fleet was substantially smaller, that over 50 per cent of the oil on which her armed forces moved was imported, and 40 per cent of her foreign trade was carried in foreign ships; that she had no conceivable ally who could have made up the deficiencies; in short, she could be brought to her knees fairly quickly with comparatively little expense by an unrestricted submarine campaign. But such use of submarines against merchant shipping had been outlawed by treaty, to which the United States was a signatory, and doubtless this attitude counted, despite the nature of warfare and the enemy, who was unlikely to abide by treaty restrictions of any kind. However, the fact that the United States had signed the treaty was a symptom of her view of the submarine as a menace in enemy hands rather than an asset in her own. In any event the analysis was never made; there was no lateral leap of imagination

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