GERMANY'S U-BOATS.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 November 1918, Page 6

GERMANY'S U-BOATS.

DESCENT TO BLACK PIRACY.? ■ STRIKING AT THE«LIFE OT. THE ' ALLIES. | HOW TIIE 'ME-NAC2 WAS MET. t . ._ . ' .. (Wellington Post);. ; u ""•' '< Germany's appeal to the submarine as • har chief naval weapon followed directly from the failure, of her original naval strategy as expressed in the High Sea fleet, and her subsequent slower, but equally obvious, failure to carry on cruiser warfare, which, indeed, depended upon some measure of success in lleet actions as a preliminary. 'Mines, to which the enemy clearly attached great importance at first, were on the whole singularly ineffective, for the minefields were continually being destroyed by the Allied patrols, and shipping was carefully shepherded. Counter-mining by the British in the North Sea had the double result of hindering the movements of the enemy's mine-layers and of further restricting the movements of nonhostile shipping and enabling it to be better guarded. This "process reached a crisis in November, 1914, whea the whole of the North Sea was declared by ih? British Government to bo a war area, in which vessels moved, except within specified narrow zones, in peril of being fired upon. This was especially a measure against the German device of covering mine-layers with neutral flags. The first definite announcement of the submarine policy came from the notorious Admiral von Tirpitz, on the 22nd I>e?rnbi>r, ls>l4, when he announced that tie would '•Xarvp EnglantiTy means of U-boats ;_ and German press, and publicists proceeded to justify this policy by declaring it s, simple reprisal for the "frightfulncss" of Britain iynd her Allies in starving the helpless women and children of Germany. The absurdity of this contention alongside of their continued assertion that Germany was not being starved did not seem to be emphasised in Germany at. all. On 4th February, 1915, Germany declared all the waters round the British isles a "danger zone," in which peaceful vessels would be exposed to attack as if they were warships; and Germany repudiated responsibility for the safety ot passengers or crews of such vessels. This 'campaign" came into operation on 18th February; but it was on the whole disappointing. There was nothing new in the method, for siiipj '..ad lieen sunk "rutlilossly" for a long time before, and the rate of destruction increased very little. The result was, as it appeared later, a. most injurious assumption thr.t the submarine "blockade'' waj not a thing to be treated seriously, and tho Alliei failed to take adequate measure-, to deal with the peril i.i the way tLut before long proved nocc-isar}"-

THE ©AWX OF "RUTELES:NESS." On the Bui May, howeve:ya new turn was given io the situation by the sinking of the Lusitania, in vAich. 1134 lives were lost, after Ccrinany hud blatantly advertised her jptentioii to destroy the liner. This flagrant and disgusting crime sent a wave of horror round the world. In particular it incensed the United States, many of whose citizens wer; among the victims; and tllcn began that long and involved aeries of diplomatic interchanges between the President and the German Government that, however it puzzled and annoyed the public, led in the end to the. American declaration of war, twenty-three months later. In the new year of 1917,_after two years of the Tirpitz "Stockade," the German Government announced that a new campaign of "unrestricted'' snbTnir'nii- 1 warfare f/as to begin- The U-boats had so far not succeeded in seriously distressing Britain. They liad failed utterly to terrify the cieamen who manned the threatened ships. But these failures had undoubedly encouraged the opinion that nothing the submarines could do need cause any worry; and the enlightenment of the ensuing months was all the more ierribta for that. The new campaign began on ISth February, and reached an almost terrifying climax in April. It is open to the gravest doubt whether the German leaders, having studied the submarine question thoroughly, ever expected to be able to use their new weapon humanely. The submarine gained power solely from their power to hide; and they wore unable to carry prize icrews or refugees; nor were ports open for the reception of captured ships. Their victims therefore had to be sun!;; and, if the campaign was to succeed, they must bo sunk in barbarous circumstance. The crimes of Germany lay originally in the adoption of the submarine at all, since its methods were essentially murderous. But the Germans took little or no trouble to reduce the sufferings of their victims. On rare occasions Do3ts wero towed towards safety or given some other slender assistance. In the vast majority of eases the crews were simply abandoned to their fate; in a great many they were deliberately murdered in cold blood. The enemy even institute! the shocking policy of destroying ships—including neutrals —so as to leave no trace-whatever, and used the services of neutral Embassies to facilitate it No distinction was made a- to the nationality of a victim; a ship was a ship, itiid anything that floated was regarded as a legitimate"target. fiermany has a long list of sunken hospital ships Ending to her eternal disgrace.

THE SHOCK OF APRTL. 1017. The Marincamt set itself a standard of destruction of a million tons a month. This was never reached, but the sinkings grew with, terrible rapidity in the early part of the campaign- April was the worst month. The month's total sinkings amounted to S<J4,OOO tons; and for April, May, and June the totaj was 2,237,000 tons—far more than Britain had ever built in a year. Nothing more than the figures was needed to awaken the world to the reality of the danger. Measures had of course been taken from the first to meet the German campaign, but it was impossible for them to keep pace at once with activity on this scale. The Germans were fought with a double campaign, destruction of U-boats on the one hand, and increased construction of ships on the other. The nary was added to by enormous numbers of small fast craft of all types; new instruments for the detection of submarines hidden by the sea, and for their dck*trwiiMi, w«*e invented, and ■brought

into.service in great variety; minefields were laid, including an enormous area sixty miles wide, extending from the Norwegian coast almost to the coa9t of Scotland, and containing about a quarter of a million mines. Slowly, but very slowly, the enemy's submarine activity was cut down, till about the middle of 1!)1S the destrueion of Üboats had about mot the rate of issue of new ones. Early in Angus, 1-918, Mr Lloyd George announced that at least 150 Üboats had been accounted for, out of a total of 3.ifl of all types. This was certainly .in under-e=timate, for it included only cases in which the evidence of destruction was positive or of capture: and rhc "donbtfuls" must have included a large number of others lost. ~ WOEK OF THE SHIPYARDS. The indirect campai.cn against the submarines, fought in the shipyards, had some surprising features, and its mark will long be visible in the history of the world's commerce. . The United Kingdom, which owned at the beginning of the war about 21,000,000 "gross tons out of the world's total of 49,000,000 tons, had throughout the history of modern shipping been the greatest producer of tonnage; and the British yearly output, particularly in the last half century, bad grown by leaps and bounds- In Wl3 it reached the record of nearly two million tons. If that rate had been maintained throughout the war, the general shipping situation wculd still have been "tight" owing to the enormous military and naval requirements; but it would have 'been very much less acute. Actually tho British output slumped heavily. Labor was transferred from the merchant yards to tho essential work of building warships: and skilled workers were drafted wholesale into the army. In 1915 the total output from RrTti'li yards was 651,000 tons; in 1010, 541,000 tons. As soon as the enemy's accelerated U-boat campaign began, tins output was seen to be intolerably low; in fact, the nation's shipyards were committing national suicide. Herculean effort* were made in every possible direct;on to speed up the output. "Standardised" construction was adopted: private builders added to their number of slips; national yards were laid down. Tint the labor problem was the. greatest, :'.nd its intensity is made clear by the fact that oven when labor set itself most earnestly to work, the wartime British output of merchant ships never, in any twelve months, reached the two million mark. It was practically hopeless for most of tho othVr shipbuilding nations of the w r orld to contribute extensively to the general fund of tonnage. Germany, of course, was out of court. The Scandinavian countries were crippled by the intense economic distress caused by the war; France and Italy had no energy to spare for increased, or even for normal shipbuilding. Japan increased her output considerably, but war, only a small contributor because she ha* no adequate native supply of steel The world was rescued by the United States. ! The United States had not in recent Vears been an important shipbuilder, and her biggest output, for a vear was 402,000 tons', in 1901; in IM3 the turnout was .110,1.5:1 tons. But America wan alone in having enormous available suoplics of capital, material, and labor. An extraordinary large "prograinnie" was laid down by the Government under the direction at first of the famous Colonel Gocthals, and later under the Federal Shipping Board, of which MrEdwin Hurley became chairman. Contrary to a«vei-y widespread opinion, the programme was not too large for the amount of energy and determination behind it. A great number of shipyards of enormous size were 'bnjlt, and 'ships of steel, wood, and composite structure began at first alowly but with everincreasing speed to tako the water. Tho results of the combined outputs was that in he second quaror of 191S the world's output exceeded the world's losses from all causes for that period by almost 300,000 tons. THE COXTOY SYSTEM. the use of an enormous number of vessels colely engaged ia U-boat bunting, tho oonmamively small number of submarines 'operating were able to carry en their work with remarkable success against vessels'aot specially protected. The, first stage, ia direct protection" was the arming of merchantmen with, guns, accompanied by the use of •'camouflage," the viajntiru? of ships so as to mislead attack-:-rs as to distance, eomsc, or position. These however, only partially succeed, and were of no avail when a U-boat vus abie to attack without warning. Tho system of convoy, as practised in former'wars, was adopted, and immediately the losses were greatly reduced. Convoying was very elaborately carried out,'arid the saving of tonnage, undoubtedly outweighed the loss of efficiency in the use of ships caused by tho inevitable delays in the cjm of vessels held back to join the convoys. The .Scandinavian tiafiic, the first to be covered by the system, was twice specially attacked!)}' the Germans. On 17th October, 1917, a convoy of twelve ship?,, escorted" by two destroyers, was attacked by two heavily- [ armed light cruisers. The destroyers and nine of the merchantmen were sunk. On 12th December a second convoy was similarly attacked and practically destroyed. Bt'.i apart from these two disasters, tho convoy system was carried out with very few losses. Only on rare occasions did torpedoes get home; and U-boats which attacked convoy;; were often destroyed by the escorts by gunfire, or depth bombs, or ramming." An interesting feature of the submarine campaign was the way in which the U-boats were forced to disperse their energies. In the British home waters the enormous number of hostilo ships soon made the campaign excessively costly; and. as the enemy had to use craft with a large fuel capacity to get round the British Isles "north* about," lie soon extended his operations far out into the Atlantic. This reduced his offensive power, but it also rendered protection more difficult until the problem was solved by the development of the convoy system. The less complete protection of shipping in the .Mediterranean, too, tempted the submarines, and a very high proportion of losses was suffered there, because for a long time it was impossible to provide sufficient forces to patrol this great hunting ground on the same scale as in the North Sea. Gcrmanv made experiments also as far away as the coast of the United States. The first venture was the dispatch of the Dcutschland, professedly a commercial vessel, but almost certainly a pioneer to test the possibility of such cruises. A second ves-

sel of the kind, the Bremen, never reached America. But in October, ltTfi, ;.T53, after claiming the hospitality of New port, Rhode Island, proceeded to sink a number of vessels 45 miles from the coast, in the presence of American warships, which rescued many of those set adrift. After the United States had entered the war, other submarines cross(4&jfll4 Attaitif ftit their work was .hut

trifling in comparison with the campaign as a whole. The acute shipping, position was relieved in many ways. German and Austro-Hungarian vessels which had sought refuge in neutralports were takeu over by the Allies in instalments as one nation after another joined tho belligerents or broke its "friendship'' with the Central Powers. About 400,000 tons of Butch tonnage was requisitioned by the Allies because it was lying idle in foreign ports. Still more important, the whole shipping system was reorganised under the direction of the Allied transport authorities, so as to secure that the maximum amount of material should bo moved by the tonnage available. The world owned, at the beginning'of the war, about 49,000,000 tons of shipping, of which a considerable proportion was unsuitable for ocean service. Out of this, according to Mr Archibald Hurd, the total quantity actually available daring the war for Allied civilian purposes was only about 5.750.000 tons; and this was reduced hy the losses, in spite of new construction, to about five million tons in the early part of 101 S. This quantity of shipping, of course, had to b? grossly over-worked according to prewar standards, and naturally the proportion lost by "marine risk" was increased as one of the consequences. The output of new American tonnage had less effect in reducing the acuteness of the shipping crisis than was popularly supposed. lOTORSEEK RESULTS. ' Under tho policy forced upon her By the war, the United States lias become one of the great slupowning nations of Die world, and is potentially the greatest, if she pursues to the full her new business of building tonnage. This is one of the notable results of the war, and is one of the aspects of tho intricate economic problems set by the submarine to be solved in the near future. Germany, however, faces the ugliest problem of all. She loft peace as the second maritime Power. .She re-enters it with a vastly reduced merchant marine, with which she must enter into competition not with one rival greater than herself at sea, but with two. And that is by no means the end of her shipping difficulty, for the great "British community that lives on and hy the sea has declared an independent boycott of Germany, and Germans as a calculated reprisal for the particular sufferings it has sustained. This great boycott, inspired l>y the vigorous personality of Mr Tlavelock Wilson—lately elected to Parliament—is :<n expression of national sentiment that has found no vigorous opposition, though it has not yet the State's .approval; and it is a force that the Germans will probably find to bo greater than they now realise.

Bisregarding the morality of the submarine campaign against pl.-inuiug in the form adopted by the Gci-mans? as to which there can he only one opinion, it still remains to be determined' whether the enemy gained or lost 'by it in the purely military rense. Without it, the Allies, freed from (ho enormous costs in labor and material imposed by the campaign, would have won the war, By f.nli«ting tho submarine, the German's secured an apparent advantage; but the submarine was the Allies most, powerful recruiting agent and was the. direct means of bringing the United States into the ranks. Once adoped, however, it could not lie abandoned; Germany was literally hoist with her own torpedoes; and sho goes (sown in history wearing the brand of Cam.

THE LESSOR OF THE SUBMARINE. The whole lesson of the submarine, especially with respect to insular States dependant largely upon sea-transport for their existence, cannot yet bo set out; kit some of its teachings are evident in the war, Ihe Germans had io build their U-ho.it fleet as they vent; and the defence measures grew with it. One shudders to think what would have liapened if in Iftl't Germany, with concealed purpose, had possessed a large licet of submarines as effective as those built during her great campaign, and had used it against the unprepared merchant marine. But the submarine is now seen in true perspective- Just as, before the day of the U-boat, -a nation which •fcuilt disproportionate numbers of fast light cruisora (as Germany had in fact begun to do) would stand suspect of designing a special war on trrvle-routcs, so an inordinate submarine programme will in future announce its purpose and call for remedy on the menaced side- \?liat ihat remedy must be is still to he seen; it is one of the matters in which the League of Kations is intimately concerned, tint an iasular Slate is henceforth unsafe unless it guards, better than Britain did. against depletion of its food supply by ■blockade. W'wu the war began,' the British ilovermm-nt eon trolled certain

stocks of foodstuffs, but they were negligible in amount compared with the national needs. It is true that the supplies of the world were waiting for shipment; but when' tho prior claims of the lighting sources were met, the amount of shipping available was: not enough to carry the required quantities of food. And this "surplus' of shipping had to stand tho losses indicted by the enemy. The result was that the British ration -,,-as compelled, as a war measure, to begin growing foodstuffs on a, much larger scale than before, and to meet the shortage by strict rationing, i Fortunately the pinch, though sever:' land in mcr; rer-pecs distressing, nrvpr reached a rc.-'lly aci'te slage. But in I the el'.d it VC'. plain that the submarin-.' : had thrown ii-cal argument, the. war of the protectionist and the freetrader, into a background against, which national safety stood out clearly as the real object, to be kept in view In future. A nation may perhaps wait for a while before its army is moved beyond its confines: it cannot wait for food. The technical aspect of defence against submarines has to a considerable extent been solved by experience in the war, and as long as the possibility of their use in the German way remains, navies must apply, in some large measure, the experience of the past few years. And if will remain the burden, especially of the insular State, liaMc to he crippled by the destruction of shipping, to maintain such protective measures at, tinhighest state of development and availability.