… Port and starboard engines roar wide open.
Once the location of the U-boat was determined, the listeners raised their SC-tube up and into its protective housing. The hunting group tactic to pursue, stop, listen, and pursue was a process often repeated several times—an operation for which SC-124 had received ample training while at New London. U-boat captains, also well trained, had many options when attempting to escape the hunters, and the ears of the listeners. Millholland:
Dorgan had stopped and listened for the fleet mine-laying submarine, sufficiently to plot its general course and lay plans for a quick dash ahead for a final bombing attack. But the rain also cut down visibility to a point where a low object in the water, like a submarine, could not be seen at more than a half-mile away. We had stopped to get one last “fix” on the sub when the listener suddenly reported “Sub has broached to the surface. She’s running away on her Diesels, sir!”
Once again, it was “Up tubes and away!” and “Full speed ahead!” The other subchasers, which had been listening to the U-boat on their SC-tubes to provide that “fix” on its position, followed SC-124 through the rain. As the trio passed out of the squall, the crow’s nest lookout shouted, “Sub-marreen! Dead ahead on the surface!” The subchaser gun crews had prepared to engage the U-boat, but the pursuit ended suddenly. The U-boat had escaped to its base along the Albanian coast and to the protection of Austrian destroyers.
Not all U-boats were as fortunate as the one SC-124 chased into the Adriatic. As the months of 1918 went by, however, morale deteriorated among many of the crews of U-boats which did survive. American subchasers maintained their relentless pursuit, with their listeners constantly on duty. As Admiral William S. Sims recalled, “Who would ever have thought that a little wooden vessel, displacing only sixty tons, measuring 110 feet from bow to stern … proved one of the formidable enemies of the submarine?”10
The technologies used by the listeners during the Great War had their origins in the minds of dedicated civilians on both sides of the Atlantic. Motivated by a sense of urgency, everyone worked in a successful collaboration with men like Ray Millholland and the crew of SC-124 to create effective deterrents to the notorious U-boat. By the end of the war, the staff of the Naval Experimental Station at Fort Trumbull in New London, Connecticut, consisted of thirty-two scientists and engineers from several universities supported by nearly 700 naval officers and enlisted men.11
The Great War had been referred to as “The War to End All Wars,” an unrealized hope when only two decades later, the Second World War saw submarines return to the waters of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the distant Pacific. Once again, a new generation of civilian scientists and engineers assembled at Fort Trumbull to resume the development of what became known as SONAR, an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging. Their work continued after the surrender of Germany and Japan when the Soviet Union rose from the ashes to become the next adversary to democracy. Submarine and antisubmarine warfare soon became a major component of Cold War strategy; once again, the “listeners” played a major role.
PART I
1914-1916
CHAPTER 1 PREDATOR AND PREY
At 7:47 P.M. on August 4 we received the message, “Prepare for war with England.”
—Admiral Reinhard Scheer, Germany’s High Sea Fleet, 19201
After massing her troops along the Belgian border on the 3rd of August, 1914, Germany declared war on France. An ultimatum that Germany respect Belgian neutrality and withdraw was immediately sent by Britain, and summarily rejected. The British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen, was recalled and at 11:00 p.m. on the 4th, Britain declared war. With an efficiency brought by a newly-mechanized twentieth century, German invasion forces rapidly crossed into Belgium and soon established a front along the northern border of France. When Admiral Reinhard Scheer received the message to prepare for war with England, the Imperial German Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, was ready.
Earlier that day on the 4th, the auxiliary minelayer Königin Luise, already at sea, received the wireless message: “Make for sea in Thames direction at top speed. Lay mines near as possible the English coasts …”2 It was on August 5, the day after Britain declared war, that the minelayer completed her mission, but had been discovered by British destroyers; after a brief chase Königin Luise was sent to the bottom. In less than twenty-four hours, however, the mines had done their work when one of them was struck by HMS Amphion, which soon shared the minelayer’s fate. War had arrived off the British Isles.
Throughout Europe, Germany had been perceived as a military powerhouse after her swift victory during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. For three decades, Germany’s High Seas Fleet had been gathering strength and was anxious to prove itself against what the British unabashedly referred to as The Grand Fleet. Unprepared for the scale of aggression brought by their belligerent neighbor on the continent, the British Admiralty scrambled to meet what was obvious to everyone—that this war would quickly expand beyond the battlefields of Europe and onto the surrounding seas. What was less obvious was that the war would also slip beneath the surface of the ocean.
Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who became Commander in Chief of the High Seas Fleet in January, 1916, and later Chief of the Admiralty Staff, noted in his memoir: “[A] decision was taken which was extremely important for the further course of the war … for the U-boats received orders to proceed on August 6 [1914] against English battleships, the presence of which was suspected in the North Sea.”3 These orders would set the stage for additional forays into the waters between Britain and Germany. On the morning of September 22, Otto Weddigen, in command of U-9 with a crew of four officers and twenty-five enlisted, sent torpedoes into the sides of three British armored cruisers, Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, all three sinking within an hour with a loss of over 1400 officers and crew.
The success of a single submarine, and a nearly obsolete one at that, had surprised not only the British, but Germany as well. Maybe the Grand Fleet was not so grand after all. Construction of bigger, faster, better armed submarines would become a priority at Krupp-Germania and other German shipyards. No longer just a vessel designed for coastal defense, the U-boat fleet soon had the capability to spend weeks—even months—at sea, covering thousands of miles. They could now lay mine fields across harbors, undetected. They carried large caliber guns mounted on deck which could engage Allied shipping on the surface, saving their torpedoes for higher value, higher tonnage targets.
A massive engagement between the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet was inevitable, where dreadnaughts, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers on both sides pummeled each other with their massive firepower. This confrontation occurred over two days, May 31 to June 1, 1916, at the Battle of Jutland—known in Germany as the Battle of the Skagerrak. Both sides claimed victory, but ended any further major engagements between the surface fleets of Britain and Germany; future naval operations during the Great War would be defined beneath the sea.4
Britain had depended on the Grand Fleet to deal with warfare on the open ocean, and the Admiralty’s first priority was to mobilize all of its resources—old ships reconditioned; new ships designed and built; manpower recruited. Submarines and the deadly torpedoes they carried, however, soon defined the realities of the twentieth-century, and antisubmarine warfare would also have to become a priority. Yet in 1914, no one really understood the complexity of the submarine problem nor the technology that would be needed to counter the threat.
TORPEDO WAR AND SUBMARINE EXPLOSIONS
I endeavoured for many years to get torpedoes introduced into practice in France, and in England; which, though unsuccessful, gave me the opportunity of making numerous very interesting experiments on a large scale …”5
Robert Fulton published his pamphlet “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions” in 1810 as another war with England seemed inevitable. Fulton was attempting to convince Congress that his device could be “so arranged as to blow up a vessel which should run against it …”6 He had already been