WWI U-boat Campaign – War-Winner?

By Andrew Gordon
How far is blame appropriate for the near loss of the Great War to the U-boat? In operational, if not quite technological terms, submarine warfare progressed between 1914 and 1918 every bit as much as aerial warfare, and posed a threat of far greater strategic significance. That threat, seemingly, came from nowhere. Had the conflict which broke out in August 1914 been over as quickly as was widely expected, it would never have been discovered – at least in this war.

The cruiser guerre de course, on the other hand, had been long imagined, and catered for; and, after some initial confusion, was dealt with more or less within the pre-anticipated timeframe of hostilities – assisted by Fisher’s all big-gun revolution which had been conceived with that purpose expressly in mind. One must fairly acknowledge the difficulty of investing in an antidote to a mode of warfare whose practicability had scarcely been imagined, still less demonstrated, and which was specifically banned by international conventions. But in the current era of apparently unassailable western military superiority, it is sobering to reflect that Britain and her Allies came so close to losing the Great War because of an offensive weapon which scarcely flickered on the radar screen of human awareness at the outbreak.

The institution of the wrong doctrine in the Grand Fleet, and the near fatal delay in adopting convoying in answer to the U-boat threat appear to be unrelated, and were quite different in the timescales involved. The first was the osmostic product of two or three generations of peacetime sailoring, and the second was an obtuseness lasting just a few months. But they had this in common: they both represented a cutting edge technocratic dismissal of old concepts as potential solutions to challenges brought about by radical technology. In both cases, the technical evangelists were too tightly focused on ‘transformation’, and in both cases what proved to be the appropriate doctrine was handed down from the classic, combat-intensive unscientific days of sail – an era which they assumed had been confined to the museum, lock, stock and barrel.

The truth is that to impose its will, every military force has to deal with the ‘real world’ of all the circumstances bearing upon its effective output, and in which the enemy may be only one shifting circumstance among several. Some of those circumstances may lie internally, in the realms of leadership, structure, personnel, technology, training or doctrine. The Royal Navy fought the Great War with some major self-assumed handicaps, and in the end surmounted them. Across the North Sea, by the time the U-boat campaign was obviously defeated, the German High Seas Fleet had lapsed into irretrievable operational obsolescence, even dereliction. Its best young officers and technicians had been siphoned off and expended in the U-boats, while the Grand Fleet, by contrast, had quietly grown in strength and stature: Beatty had driven through reforms which had restored the feared ‘Nelson spirit’ to its tactical doctrine, and it had been swollen by a squadron of American battleships. A new fleet encounter would have been a hopeless, suicidal business for the Kaiser’s demoralised Luxusflotte. It was going nowhere, other than to Scapa Flow to open its sea-cocks.