It took place largely in the seas around the British Isles and in the Mediterranean. The German Empire relied on imports for food and domestic food production especially fertilizer and the United Kingdom relied heavily on imports to feed its population, and both required raw materials to supply their war industry; the powers aimed, therefore, to blockade one another. The British had the Royal Navy which was superior in numbers and could operate on most of the world's oceans because of the British Empire , whereas the Imperial German Navy surface fleet was mainly restricted to the German Bight , and used commerce raiders and unrestricted submarine warfare to operate elsewhere.
In the course of events in the Atlantic alone, German U-boats sank almost 5, ships with nearly 13 million gross register tonnage , losing boats and about 5, men in combat. In August , a flotilla of nine U-boats sailed from their base in Heligoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea in the first submarine war patrol in history.
The first sortie was not a success. Two of the ten U-boats were lost. Other successes followed. By the end of the initial campaign, the U-boats had sunk nine warships while losing five of their own number.
The initial phase of the U-boat campaign in the Mediterranean comprised the actions by the Austro-Hungarian Navy 's U-boat force against the French, who were blockading the Straits of Otranto. At the start of hostilities, the Austro-Hungarian Navy had seven U-boats in commission; five operational, two training; all were of the coastal type, with limited range and endurance, suitable for operation in the Adriatic.
However during the war new larger U-boats came into service plus Germany shipped several overland. The Austro-Hungarian U-boats had a number of successes.
In the U-boat's chief advantage was to submerge; surface ships had no means to detect a submarine underwater, and no means to attack even if they could, while in the torpedo the U-boat had a weapon that could sink an armoured warship with one shot. Its disadvantages were less obvious, but became apparent during the campaign.
While submerged the U-boat was virtually blind and immobile; boats of this era had limited underwater speed and endurance, so needed to be in position before an attack took place, while even on the surface their speed around 15 knots was less than the cruising speed of most warships and two-thirds that of the most modern dreadnoughts.
The U-boats scored a number of impressive successes, and were able to drive the Grand Fleet from its base in search of a safe anchorage, but the German Navy was unable to erode the Grand Fleet's advantage as hoped. Also, in the two main surface actions of this period the U-boat was unable to have any effect; the High Seas Fleet was unable to draw the Grand Fleet into a U-boat trap.
Whilst warships were travelling at speed and on an erratic zigzag course they were relatively safe, and for the remainder of the war the U-boats were unable to mount a successful attack on a warship travelling in this manner [ citation needed ]. The first attacks on merchant ships had started in October At that time there was no plan for a concerted U-boat offensive against Allied trade.
It was recognised the U-boat had several drawbacks as a commerce raider, and such a campaign risked alienating neutral opinion. In the six months to the opening of the commerce war in February , U-boats had sunk 19 ships, totalling 43, GRT. By early , all the combatants had lost the illusion that the war could be won quickly, and began to consider harsher measures in order to gain an advantage. The British, with their overwhelming sea power, had established a naval blockade of Germany immediately on the outbreak of war in August , and in early November declared it to be a war zone, with any ships entering the North Sea doing so at their own risk.
The Germans regarded this as a blatant attempt to starve the German people into submission and wanted to retaliate in kind, and in fact the severity of the British blockade did not go over well in America either. Germany could not possibly deal with British naval strength on an even basis, and the only possible way Germany could impose a blockade on Britain was through the U-boat.
The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg , felt that such a submarine blockade, based on "shoot without warning", would antagonise the United States and other neutrals. However, he was unable to hold back the pressures for taking such a step.
From February 18 onwards every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. In time, this would bring non-European nations such as Brazil and the United States into the war. The German U-boat force was now primarily based at Ostend in Belgium, giving the submarines better access to the sea lanes around England.
The Germans made use of this advantage, sending out about 20 U-boats to begin the naval blockade. In January, before the declaration of "unrestricted submarine warfare" as the submarine blockade was called, 43, tonnes of shipping had been sunk by U-boats. The number of sinkings then steadily increased, with , tonnes going down in August.
On 10 April the British steamer Harpalyce , a Belgian relief ship and clearly marked as such, was torpedoed without warning by SM UB-4 near the North Hinder lightship, just outside the strip of sea declared safe by von Pohl. The ship had been en route for America to collect food for starving Belgians, and its sinking outraged American citizens already unhappy at the death of Leon C.
Of the 1, people aboard, 1, were killed, of them US citizens. Following the incident, the German government attempted to justify it with a range of arguments; nevertheless there was massive outrage in Britain and America, and the British felt that the Americans had to declare war on Germany.
However, US President Woodrow Wilson refused to overreact, though some believed the massive loss of life caused by the sinking of Lusitania required a firm response from the US. Ultimately it was proven later via the discovery of munitions in the wreck that the Lusitania was indeed carrying munitions; against the agreed upon rules during the conflict. When Germany began its U-boat campaign against Britain, Wilson had warned that the US would hold the German government strictly accountable for any violations of American rights.
Backed by State Department second-in-command Robert Lansing , Wilson made his position clear in three notes to the German government issued on 13 May, 9 June, and 21 July. The first note affirmed the right of Americans to travel as passengers on merchant ships and called for the Germans to abandon submarine warfare against commercial vessels, whatever flag they sailed under.
In the second note Wilson rejected the German arguments that the British blockade was illegal, and was a cruel and deadly attack on innocent civilians, and their charge that Lusitania had been carrying munitions. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan considered Wilson's second note too provocative and resigned in protest after failing to have it moderated. The third note, of 21 July, issued an ultimatum, to the effect that the US would regard any subsequent sinkings as "deliberately unfriendly".
While the American public and leadership were not ready for war, the path to an eventual declaration of war had been set as a result of the sinking of Lusitania. The appearance of new minefields off the East coast of Britain in June was puzzling to the Royal Navy due to the waters being very busy, and was blamed initially on neutral fishing boats.
However, on 2 July the small coaster Cottingham accidentally ran down the small coastal U-boat UC-2 off Great Yarmouth , and when she was salvaged she was found to be a submarine minelayer, fitted with twelve mines in six launching chutes. On 21 August UC-5 became the first submarine minelayer to penetrate into the English Channel, laying 12 mines off Boulogne, one of which sank the steamship William Dawson the same day. UC-5 laid 6 more mines off Boulogne and Folkestone on 7 September, one of which sank the cable layer Monarch.
He fired a single torpedo which struck the liner aft, and she sank within 10 minutes, with the loss of 44 passengers and crew, 3 of whom were American. Following speculation that the US would sever relations with Germany, on 28 August the Chancellor issued new orders to submarine commanders and relayed them to Washington.
The new orders stated that until further notice, all passenger ships could only be sunk after warning and the saving of passengers and crews. This proved unacceptable to the Naval High Command, and on 18 September the High Seas flotillas were withdrawn from the commerce war. The German Navy sent their first submarines to the Mediterranean in response to the Anglo-French Dardanelles campaign , after it became obvious that their Austro-Hungarian allies could do little against it with their small submarine force, which nevertheless was successful in defending the Adriatic.
The first U-boats sent, U and the two small coastal boats, UB-7 and UB-8 , achieved initial success, U sinking the Royal Navy pre-dreadnought battleships HMS Triumph and HMS Majestic on 25 and 27 May, respectively, on her way to Constantinople, but ran into severe limitations in the Dardanelles, where swarms of small craft and extensive anti-submarine netting and booms restricted their movements.
They were also assembling three Type UC I minelaying submarines, which were ordered converted into transports to carry small quantities of critical supplies to Turkey. The Mediterranean was an attractive theater of operations to the German Admiralstab ; a significant proportion of British imports passed through it, it was critical to French and Italian trade, and submarines would be able to operate effectively in it even in autumn and winter when poor weather hampered Atlantic and North Sea operations.
Additionally, there were certain choke points through which shipping had to pass, such as the Suez Canal , Malta, Crete , and Gibraltar. Finally, the Mediterranean offered the advantage that fewer neutral ships would be encountered, [14] such as US or Brazilian vessels, since fewer non-European citizens then travelled the waters. Throughout the summer, the German navy assembled a force of four U-boats at Cattaro for operations against commerce in the Mediterranean.
The campaign got underway in October , when U and U , followed later by U , were ordered to attack the approaches to Salonika and Kavalla. That month, 18 ships were sunk, for a total of 63, tons. It was decided the same month that further reinforcements were called for, and a further large U-boat, U sailed for Cattaro. Since Germany was not yet at war with Italy, even though Austria was, the German submarines were ordered to refrain from attacking Italian shipping in the eastern Mediterranean where the Italians might expect hostile action only from German submarines.
When operating in the west, up to the line of Cape Matapan , the German U-boats flew the Austrian flag, and a sinking without warning policy was adopted, since large merchant ships could be attacked on the suspicion of being transports or auxiliary cruisers. Since these were too large to be shipped in sections by rail to Pola like the Type UB I, the materials for their construction and German workers to assemble them were sent instead.
This meant a shortage of workers to complete U-boats for service in home waters, but it seemed justified by the successes in the Mediterranean in November, when 44 ships were sunk, for a total of , tons. The total in December fell to 17 ships 73, tons which was still over half the total tonnage sunk in all theaters of operation at the time.
In November , U caused a diplomatic incident when she sank the Italian steamer SS Ancona while sailing under the Austrian flag, and the loss of nine American citizens caused the "sinking without warning" policy to be suspended in April until the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in A similar "false flag" incident in March was an influence on Italy's decision to declare war on Germany in August Defensive measures, such as arming merchant ships, and advising them to either run, or turn towards the U-boat in order to ram, or force it to submerge, were the most effective.
The following step was to arm and man ships with hidden guns to do so, the so-called Q ship. A variant on the idea was to equip small vessels with a submarine escort. In , two U-boats were sunk by Q-ships, and two more by submarines accompanying trawlers.
Offensive measures were less effective; efforts were made to use nets to find submerged U-boats, and explosive sweeps to destroy them, but these were largely failures. These measures required a huge expenditure of effort and material, but met with little success. Just two U-boats were sunk by these measures in On the other hand, serious offence had been given to neutrals such as Norway and the Netherlands, and brought the United States to the brink of war.
This failure, and the various restrictions imposed on the U-boat Arm in the Atlantic area largely brought the campaign there to a halt, although it continued with little hindrance in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, where there was less likelihood of offending neutrals.
Given the ineffectiveness of early countermeasures, in Britain and in America adopted dazzle camouflage to attempt to reduce shipping losses to torpedoes. The results in both cases were inconclusive. The depth charge, or "dropping mine" as it was initially named, was first mooted in , and developed into practicality when the British Royal Navy's Commander in Chief, Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Callaghan , requested its production in Anti-submarine vessels initially carried only two depth charges, to be released from a chute at the stern of the ship.
Germany became aware of the depth charge following unsuccessful attacks on U on 15 April , and U on 20 April. UC and UB were the only other submarines sunk by depth charges during In the German Navy again tried to use the U-boats to erode the Grand Fleet's numerical superiority; they staged operations to lure the Grand Fleet into a U-boat trap. Because the U-boats were much slower than the battle fleet, these operations required U-boat patrol lines to be set up in advance; then the battle fleet manoeuvred to draw the Grand Fleet onto them.
Several of these operations were staged, in March and April , but with no success. Ironically, the major fleet action which did take place, the Battle of Jutland , in May , saw no U-boat involvement at all; the fleets met and engaged largely by chance, and there were no U-boat patrols anywhere near the battle area. A further series of operations, in August and October , were similarly unfruitful, and the strategy was abandoned in favor of resuming commerce warfare.
The British were well aware of the risk of U-boat traps to the Grand Fleet, although they had no means of knowing where these might lie. However Jellicoe had developed a tactical response to the problem which, in the event, was never tested. Faced with a German fleet that turned away, he would assume a submarine trap, and decline to follow, but would move at high speed to the flank, before deploying or opening fire; the aim of this would be to fight the battle away from the ground chosen by his enemy, and forcing any U-boats present to surface if they intended to follow.
During the commerce war continued unabated in the Mediterranean. Allied countermeasures were largely ineffective; the complex arrangements for co-operation between the various navies meant a fragmented and unco-ordinated response, while the main remedy favored by the Allies for the U-boat menace, the Otranto Barrage , was of little value. Just two U-boats were caught in the barrage in all the time it was in operation; meanwhile merchant shipping suffered huge losses.
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