The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

The-present day submariner would not be surprised, because it is now known that after 24 hours or so, individuals’ germs become immune to each other! It is only on return to harbour and being exposed to others’ ‘foreign bodies’ that submariners must rebuild their bacterial resistance with, in traditional fashion, alcohol proving a first-class catalyst. Indeed, letting off steam was a necessary relief to the pressures of patrol, and the role of the Depot Ship in this context was brought sharply into focus during the First War. The concept of the ‘Mother’ had been introduced from the earliest days of submarining (the first was HMS Hazard in 1902), but by tradition they tended to be hulks, with priority once again being given to workshop facilities rather than the comforts of attached crews. During the early conflict it was recognised that ‘rest and relaxation’, in as ‘hassle-free’ a scenario as possible, was the most beneficial recuperative tonic to get crews ready to go back to sea. It was concluded that a ten-day patrol needed four days rest to restore the balance (this compared with a ratio of 21:7 in the Second War in equivalent waters). Even those men who were showing the signs of neurasthenia were noted to recover rapidly after these few days in stress-free conditions.

In addition to comfortable bunks and good laundry facilities, there was a general call for the adjacency of a soccer pitch so that the crews could take exercise, although one cynical CO remarked that ‘those that took exercise the most, missed it the most’ and he was probably right. Four designated Depot Ships were built between the wars with, in addition to their routine comforts, rest-camps being established at every opportunity, although, hurriedly one should add, without the extremes of pleasure that were provided for German U-boat crews! These rest camps were much more appreciated than soccer pitches, and Leading Telegraphist Arthur Dickison of HMS Safari waxed lyrical about their recuperative qualities.

Malta under siege and the base of the famous ‘Fighting Tenth’, however, offered few comforts, and in a renowned exchange between Captain Shrimp Simpson and Flag Officer Submarines (Horton), after the former had been taken to task for inviting HMS Turbulent, in the same signal that provided vital routing instructions, ‘to bring plenty of booze’, retorted to his senior:

‘Sir, I would have you know that in all the time I have commanded the Tenth Submarine Flotilla, never have I known anything like the disastrous series of misses that have occurred during the last month. This has coincided with Lazaretto’s supply of refreshment being completely exhausted. The two matters are not disconnected. I consider that anything to relieve the staleness of my overstrained COs is a matter of the most vital importance.’

Ben Bryant commented: ‘Malta at the end of the siege was dreary; men who are subjected to considerable strain do not readily relax and regain their resilience when all is dull and depressing; they go stale. A stale CO would be that second or two slower, the second or so that makes the difference between success and failure.’

Bromage’s action in Sahib in speeding up at the crucial moment was an example of the second between life and death. After one aircraft bomb (dropped on the area of torpedo discharge disturbance) and 56 depth-charges, Sahib managed to stagger to the surface, and the crew abandoned ship to be subsequently picked up and made prisoners of war by the Italians.

During each of the World Wars a number of British submariners became prisoners of war: 152 during the First, and 359 during the Second. To read the accounts of the manner in which they survived attack and remained alive to go into captivity is to appreciate the significance of the expression ‘a hair’s breadth’ in war. To put this into context, every 2 feet of depth for a submarine equates to an extra pound per square inch of pressure on the hull, so at the 500-foot depth at which HMS Splendid (Lieutenant Ian McGeoch DSO DSC) began her recovery from a depth-charge attack by the German frigate Hermes that felt as ‘if a gigantic sea-terrier had grabbed the submarine by the scruff of the neck with intent to kill’

, she would have been subjected to 2501b per square inch. For her to reach the surface before flooding water under this tremendous pressure overcame the reserve of buoyancy required to maintain upward momentum, was a miracle, and testimony to McGeoch’s speed of reaction. He and two-thirds of his crew became Italian POWs.

Others who survived from submarines attacked on the surface rather than dived were spared the gut-wrenching minutes of wondering whether the pressure hull would remain sufficiently intact to avoid its becoming their tomb, but their shortened experiences were nevertheless just as terrifying.

One of the unluckiest submarines to suffer such a fate was HMS E20 in the Sea of Marmara in November 1915. She had been working with HMS H1 as ‘chummy boat’

and although they had both been surprised by the presence of FS Turquoise, they became a threesome. Part of the process of working together, in addition to conducting local water-space management and co-ordinating tasking, was to arrange a rendezvous to agree future tasking. HMS E20 was waiting for Turquoise in the agreed position when, at about 5pm in glassy conditions with a slight haze, the party on the upper deck, enjoying a leisurely smoke, suddenly spotted a periscope soon followed by the wake of a torpedo. The subsequent explosion blew the British submarine in half. Lieutenant AN Tebbs RN, the First Lieutenant, describes how ‘the wire for the heel of the foremast caught my foot and carried me down with the boat to a considerable depth. A rather curious fact was that the air which must have been forced out of the fore-hatch enabled me to take a breath before I actually got to the surface, and before I had got clear of the boat itself.’ Eight other men survived and were picked up by their attacker, U-14, an Austrian-built boat manned mainly by Germans. ‘We were treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy. Everything that could be done for our comfort was done.’ Tebbs was to learn the circumstances of HMS E20’s loss from U-14’s CO:

“‘You have the Frenchman to thank. We knew where you would be this evening from the Turquoise’s chart.” Some ten days previous to our being sunk we had arranged the rendezvous for the 4th/5th, and in the meantime, without informing us, she had attempted to go down the Straits once more, owing I believe, to lack of fuel. His periscope was shot away, and he surrendered his boat… On his chart was found, in writing, the time and place of the intended meeting with us.’

Tebbs and his colleagues became Turkish POWs.

The experience of being well-treated once picked up was universal, but until that moment of recovery there was little respite from attack even though the submarine was evidently ‘hors de combat’. McGeoch in Splendid lost 18 men out of his crew of 48 through the continued shelling of the Hermes, and Bromage in Sahib reported that although it was obvious that his submarine was being abandoned, she still came under heavy attack from two escorts and a Ju88 aircraft. After he had been rescued Bromage thanked the CO of Climene for not firing to hit his stricken submarine, but the latter said he had been! What this demonstrates, despite the gracious charm shown by his enemy when Bromage had been rescued, was the determination to sink the hated submarine without regard for the survival of the crew. A similar plight befell HMS E13 when she ran aground in 1914 when attempting to enter the Baltic. Although in the neutral waters of Denmark she was repeatedly attacked by two German destroyers, and her crew fired upon by machine-gun when they attempted to swim to safety. It was only through the intervention of a Danish destroyer that the other half of the crew was not massacred.

In a similar vein, no comparison between the two wars would be complete without a brief mention of two actions that have been branded by some commentators as ‘war crimes’. Each involves British submarine commanding officers. They were those of Herbert in Baralong

in 1915 and Miers in Torbay

in 1942. Both ordered the shooting of apparently unarmed survivors following attacks conducted by them (albeit Herbert was in command of a Q-ship). Their thought processes were very similar to those who pressed home attacks with men in the water – while they remained a perceived threat, and until their contribution could be guaranteed to be at an end, they were subject to the ultimate penalty simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ben Bryant reinforces this message: ‘Submarining is often painted as a brutal game, but submariners are no more brutal than anyone else. Nobody should criticise the submariner unless he himself has been hunted, for it is when harassed that an animal becomes vicious.’

Both Herbert and Miers had been hunted, and were in the classic mould of submarine commanding officers.

In both wars there could have been few greater responsibilities given to a young man than to command a submarine. Onboard he was a ‘Dictator’ simply because it was his judgement and actions alone that could bring success, failure or death. As Captain Fell, a ‘Captain Teacher’ on two occasions, put it, ‘He has no one to hold his hand, to advise or correct a fatal move. His eye alone can see, and his instinct sense, the correct and only tactic to pursue; on him rests all responsibility.’

Dictator, yes, full of determination, yes, but as Ben Bryant points out, ‘no man relies more completely upon each and every member of his crew. A good submarine crew is far more than a team; they are as near as possible during attack, a single composite body using the CO as their eye and their director.’

So perhaps there is after all an explanation of ‘The Trade’, but let a United States Air Force Officer have the last word on the subject. Colonel Bradley Gaylord was on board HMS Seraph for ‘Operation Kingpin’ in 1942 (the pick-up of General Giraud from Vichy France) when he noted in his diary:

‘How could you have claustrophobia among these smiling boys whose easy informality was so apparently a thin cover for the rigid discipline on which every man knows his life depends upon the other fellow. It is so completely infectious. You suddenly realise that here is one of the essential points about war: there is no substitute for good company. The boys in the Submarine Service convey a spirit which quickly explains why they would sooner be in submarines than anywhere else.’

Notes on contributors

Commander Jeff Tall OBE RN, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, UK.

Commander Jeff Tall is the Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a post he has held since August 1994 when he retired from the Royal Navy. A submariner for twenty eight years, he has served all over the world and commanded four submarines: HMS Olympus, HMS Finwhale, HMS Churchill and, finally, the nuclear powered Polaris Missile submarine, HMS Repulse. He served as Admiral Sandy Woodward’s submarine staff officer during the Falklands Conflict in 1982. He was co-author, with the naval historian Paul Kemp, of HM Submarines in Camera, he wrote the historical element of the CD-Rom The RN Submarine Service - Past Present and Future, produced jointly with the Royal Naval School, which is available to the general public.

Recommended reading

Carr, William Guy, By Guess and By God (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1930)

Chapman, Paul, Submarine Torbay (London: Robert Hale, 1989)

Chatterton, E. Keble, Amazing Adventure (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1935)

Dickison, Arthur, Crash Dive (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, in association with The Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1999)

Edwards, Kenneth, We Dive at Dawn (London: Rich & Cowan, 1939)

Mackenzie, Hugh, Sword of Damocles (Gosport: Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1995)

McGeoch, Ian, An affair of Chances (London: Imperial War Museum, 1991)

Padfield, Peter, War Beneath the Sea – Submarine Conflict 1939–1945 (London: John Murray, 1995)

Shankland, Peter and Hunter, Anthony, Dardanelles Patrol (London: Collins, 1964)

Wilson, Michael, Baltic Assignment – British Submarines in Russia 1914–1919 (London: Leo Cooper)

Wingate, John, The Fighting Tenth (London: Leo Cooper, 1991)

Young, Edward, One of our Submarines (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997)

Chapter 4 (#ulink_21b5a42c-574e-5fd1-bb20-7acfb8f68304)

The merchant seaman at war (#ulink_21b5a42c-574e-5fd1-bb20-7acfb8f68304)

Tony Lane

The development of submarine commerce warfare in the First World War and its extensive and systematic application in the Second World War ensured that in both wars merchant seamen were the only civilians to be killed in large numbers by military action: 14,679 in the First War, 28,000 in the Second. Where in each war the casualty rates suffered by merchant seamen were higher than those for Royal Navy seamen, in 1939–45 merchant seamen actually had a higher death rate than any of the armed forces. The wars produced a few epic encounters between lightly armed merchant ships and warships, and frequent examples of extraordinarily resourceful feats of survival in lifeboats and the nursing homeward of seriously damaged ships. Of the latter, there was the extraordinary case of the San Demetrio. Abandoned by her crew, then reboarded by those in a lifeboat unnoticed by a rescue ship, fires were extinguished and makeshift steering organised. With engines restarted, the San Demetrio limped home with her cargo of petrol – to be celebrated in a full-length feature film and a Government publication, The Saga of San Demetrio, by F. Tennyson Jesse (HMSO, 1942).

Seafarers could hardly have been unaware of their critical role in bringing in food and raw materials, or insensitive to the risks they ran; neither their exploits nor their crucial role in the supply chain seems in any way to have affected their everyday behaviour. They did not set aside their habitual independent-minded attitudes to shipboard discipline and become ‘respectable’ and orderly patriotic citizens. In both wars, merchant seamen unquestioningly adjusted to testing circumstances, but in their everyday actions they insisted on being themselves. They were intensely proud of their occupational culture, and at the heart of this fine mesh of norms and values was a profound belief in the legitimacy of resistance to breaches of customary rules of justice and fair play, and entitlement, when opportunity offered, to a ‘good run ashore’. These beliefs were not set aside in the exceptional conditions of war, and merchant seafarers could therefore seem to be both heroic and a disorderly rabble. They were neither. They were themselves.

Ships, crews and war

Only 20 years separated the end of one war and the beginning of the next. It was therefore a relatively simple matter for those administering the direction and the organisation of shipping in the Second World War to draw upon the experience of the First. The Ministry of Shipping, which did not appear until 1916 in the Great War, was operative in 1939 just six weeks after the outbreak of war, and had key senior officials who had held similar posts in 1918.

In 1939, as previously, this new ministry had overall control of the destinations and the cargoes carried, although day-to-day technical and personnel management of ships was left in the hands of the shipping companies. Military protection was of course the Admiralty’s responsibility, and here, as in commercial operations, the Royal Navy was in 1939 much better prepared. Where in 1914 the Admiralty had been obliged to use the Lloyd’s insurance market’s global network of agents to advise shipmasters on avoidance of normal routes and on ‘blackout’ precautions, in 1939 the master needed only to open ‘Envelope Z’. Previously lodged in his safe, it contained a single sheet giving the ship its secret call-sign and instructions on radio silence and blackout procedures. The Admiralty had also been providing training courses for merchant ships’ deck officers since 1937 on the likely demands of war, and more than two-thirds of officers had attended them by September 1939. Gunnery training for officers began in the summer of 1938, and for ratings from early in 1939.

In the First War merchant ships only began to be equipped with defensive armament (stern-mounted 4-inch or 12-pounder guns) from 1916, and the typical gun crew was led by a recalled, retired naval gunner and assisted by volunteers from among the crew. In 1939 guns that were often relics from the Great War were quickly brought out of store and fitted between voyages when port-time and labour availability allowed. By 1943 every ship was armed with at least one large gun at the stern and lighter anti-aircraft weapons, and gadgets such as anti-aircraft kites. The deliveries in increasing numbers of American-built Liberty ships with purpose-built gun platforms and modern quick-firing guns from early 1943 finally provided the ultimate in armed merchant ships. By this time merchant ships were also being provided with professional gunners. Early in the Second World War gunners, as in the First, were either a mixture of recalled naval professionals and volunteers or wholly recruited from among trained crew members. By 1944 there were 24,000 naval gunners aboard merchant ships and a further 14,000 army gunners who were members of the specially formed Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery and universally known as DEMS gunners.

Britain’s dependence on the ability freely to import great volumes of foodstuffs and raw materials was well enough known. And it was naturally better known in 1939 after the experience of 1914–18. Nevertheless, in 1939 the British merchant fleet’s carrying capacity was 8 per cent smaller than in 1914, while both the British population and its per capita consumption of commodities had increased. For example, between 1914 and 1939 it was estimated that Britain’s weekly consumption of sugar went up from 37,000 tons to 48,000 tons and grain from 27,000 tons to 38,000 tons, increases respectively of 22 and 29 per cent. The widened gap between the supply and demand for shipping services had been met by a growing dependence upon the shipping services of other nations, especially Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. Ships of neutral nations had of course been important carriers of British imports in 1914–18. In the Second War the ships and crews of the neutral nations, which had escaped capture when their countries were occupied, made even more significant contributions; Norwegian tankers were especially valuable. Although the British economy had become increasingly oil-dependent in the inter-war years, it was Norwegian rather than British shipowners who had become tanker specialists.

The extent to which an adequate flow of supplies was maintained was necessarily a military matter, and the fundamental question was how best to protect merchant ships from submarines. After 12 months of the war at sea in 1914–18, 68 per cent of merchant ship losses were accounted for by submarines. The equivalent figure for 1939–45 was 44 per cent. The worst years for merchant seamen were 1917 and 1942, when respectively 94 and 77 per cent of sinkings were due to submarines.

In the First War it took the Admiralty a long time before it gave in to pressure, and finally, in April 1917, began to organise convoys. This was quite a policy turnaround considering that in January 1917 the Admiralty had issued a pamphlet that, in response to its critics, recorded that: ‘…the system of several ships sailing together in a convoy is not recommended in any area where submarine attack is a possibility.’