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America's U-Boats
Terror Trophies of World War I
By Chris Dubbs UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6947-7
CHAPTER 1
The First U-Boats in America
The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.
—President Woodrow Wilson, Declaration of Neutrality, August 19, 1914
Rumor circulated in June 1916 that a German super-submarine was heading to America. According to the Lloyd's Weekly News correspondent in Spain, the submarine would arrive in New York, possibly carrying a letter from the German kaiser to President Wilson, asking him to mediate a peace. The submarine had left Germany a week earlier, or would leave in a week. The U-boat was seen at sea on a course for Boston, but then spotted at other locations along the coast. As conflicting, unconfirmed reports trickled in, newspapers struggled to get hold of the story and speculate about its implications. The very notion of having one of these menacing warships show up on this side of the Atlantic unsettled the long-held conviction that the wide ocean buffered America from the troubles of Europe.
The dizzying possibilities put the port collector of New York in a quandary. Through two years of European war, the United States had fiercely maintained its neutrality. As a neutral port, New York welcomed Allied and neutral ships by the dozens every day, but no German ship had visited since the start of hostilities and the implementation of Britain's crippling blockade of German ports. Rules clearly governed the visitation of belligerent warships to neutral ports, but one on a special mission, with a letter for the president? This was uncharted territory. He did not know what he would do if the boat arrived in New York Harbor. Would he order the boat to leave immediately or allow it to stay in port for twenty-four hours? Would it be entitled to provisions? Would he arrest the captain or take him to dinner?
On July 9, 1916, the rumor came true, but instead of surfacing in New York, the submarine appeared off the Virginia Capes. When a wireless message reached Baltimore that a U-boat had entered the Chesapeake Bay, newspaper reporters scrambled to be first on the scene. Converging on the waterfront, they hired whatever boats they could find to ferry them into the harbor. An incredible scoop had fallen into their laps—a chance to glimpse the mysterious weapon that had taken the United States to the brink of war in 1915 with the sinking of the Lusitania. Since then U-boats had further burnished their villainous reputation by sinking merchant ships, passenger liners, and even relief and hospital ships.
Twilight darkened the scene and a hard rain dampened enthusiasm, but the reporters kept their vigil until the submarine finally made port, escorted by the tugboat Timmins. Steamers at berth aimed their search lights in the visitor's direction, lifting its strange silhouette out of the twilight and illuminating the word "DEUTSCHLAND" on its stern. Though not the rumored seven hundred feet long, not even half that, the enormous, whale-like superstructure looked alien and sinister.
"Hello, Deutschland." An Associated Press reporter sailed close enough to shout questions.
"Hello," the captain yelled back from the conning tower. "What do you want?"
"Where do you come from and when?"
"June 23, Helgoland."
"Did you see any British or French ships?"
"None."
"Were you chased by any British or French ships near the coast?"
"No."
That was all the news to be gathered on this night. As Deutschland tied up at the quarantine station, the reporters rushed back to land to alert the world that for the first time ever a German U-boat, the scourge of the seas, had come to America on a mysterious voyage.
At 213 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 17 feet high, Deutschland was the largest submarine in the German fleet. Throughout the war Germany had developed its submarines from small craft used for coastal defense to hearty boats that braved the North Sea and Atlantic waters to strike at the commercial shipping vital to Britain's survival. The arrival of the Deutschland in the United States demonstrated that Germany had now developed U-boats robust enough to cross the Atlantic, a development that some in Washington and in the U.S. Navy viewed with alarm.
However, Deutschland represented yet another evolutionary step in the development of the submarine. The first of its kind, this U-boat was not a warship but a freighter, and its purpose was not to sink ships but to avoid them. By traveling at night and submerging when the need arose, the Deutschland had eluded the British naval blockade and made the first solo submarine crossing of the Atlantic.
The naval blockade was Britain's strategy for winning the war. In effect for two years, it cut the flow of raw materials and foodstuffs to Germany, suffocating the economy and crimping the war effort. The Royal Navy patrolled the North Sea and the English Channel, intercepting merchant vessels suspected of carrying contraband cargo to Germany or to neutral countries that might then transport it to Germany. Britain's extensive minefields forced neutral ships into British ports for inspection. Those ships without contraband would then be escorted through the North Sea mine fields.
The United States did not view kindly this interference with its trade. In December 1914, U.S. secretary of state William Jennings Bryan wrote to Walter Hines Page, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, stipulating the likely consequences of continued interference with U.S. trade. "If it does not improve, it may arouse a feeling contrary to that which has so long existed between the American and British peoples." Even under these restrictions the United States, as a neutral country, continued to trade with the Allied and neutral nations, and would have gladly traded with Germany as well if only German ships could reach American ports.
A German shipping company headquartered in Bremen, North German Lloyd, thought it had the answer to the problem of the naval blockade: create a new type of vessel that could circumvent the British blockade and reopen trade with the United States—submersible freighters. While Britain's Grand Fleet interrupted all trade on the surface of the ocean, submarines operating like freighters would conduct their trade beneath the surface. After all, in the days before effective radar, sonar, and aircraft, submarines were virtually undetectable. The only way to locate a submarine was to make a visual sighting, and since submarines had such a low profile they were difficult to spot. Submarines usually sighted a surface ship long before they themselves were detected, in which case they simply submerged until the danger passed.
Because of their limited size and number, submersible freighters could hardly meet Germany's great need for trade, but they could bring in critical supplies and also boost national spirits at a time when they so sorely needed boosting. Lloyd built two merchant U-boats, Deutschland and Bremen, and at the time ofDeutschland 's landing in America, had four more under construction. The reality of this venture was to be tested in Baltimore, where everything depended on how the United States received this vessel.
A Warm Welcome for the Deutschland
Despite a drenching rain, a crowd gathered the next morning at the Baltimore waterfront to catch a glimpse of the already famous submarine. Deutschland had tied up at the pier of the East Forwarding Company, the local shipping representative for North German Lloyd.
America preferred to keep its distance from European squabbles, a distance roughly equivalent to the width of the Atlantic Ocean. But the Lusitania tragedy and the carnage wrought by U-boats in the year since had tested American isolationism and neutrality to the limit. Scarcely a week went by without newspaper accounts of U-boats sinking merchant ships, passenger liners, and even hospital ships. Following increasingly strong protests by President Woodrow Wilson, Germany had finally halted unrestricted submarine warfare in May 1916, two months before Deutschland docked in Baltimore, in favor of "prize rules." Under this policy, U-boats had to first surface, stop a vessel to determine its cargo, and then remove the crew from harm's way before sinking the ship.
Now that one of the infamous U-boats had appeared in a U.S. port, people wanted to see it. To the great frustration of the public and the press who gathered at the East Forwarding Company office, however, catching a glimpse of the submarine proved all but impossible. A warehouse with a twelve-foot-high wooden fence topped with barbed wire extended the length of the pier, blocking any view of the Deutschland. When burly guards prevented would-be intruders from climbing the fence, the crowd moved to the far end of the warehouse where they could at least glimpse the bow of the exotic vessel and part of the conning tower.
A flotilla of sailboats, steam yachts, and rowboats cruised up the adjacent Patapsco River for a water approach to the U-boat, but they too were thwarted. The tugboat Timmins stood between the sightseers and the Deutschland. Those few boats that managed to slip past the tug encountered a floating log boom with a net that descended to the harbor floor keeping them at a distance of one hundred feet. A small barge with wooden panels at the stern of the U-boat further obstructed it from view. Two enterprising reporters climbed atop a pile driver scaffolding from which they kept a distant vigil for the next few days. The public hungered for any scrap of news about this extraordinary event.
The only person to have gotten aboard the U-boat was the doctor from the quarantine station who could barely contain his excitement. "I've never seen such a mass of machinery in my life," he gushed to reporters. "There seemed to be 5,000 different pieces, an inexplicable tangle of burnished copper and glistening steel." His observations fed into the prevailing notion that this new German boat was a technical marvel.
Submarines of this period were primarily designed for coastal defense and short missions of a few hundred miles. U-boats tended to operate as close as possible to the British Isles, gathering in a few key locations off the coast of Ireland and in the Channel to await prey. But in two years of war, Germany had pushed the development of its U-boats in an attempt to counter the British blockade with its own interruption of British trade. Now, Deutschland had traveled four thousand miles from its home port of Bremen, through a naval blockade, and across the stormy Atlantic. Alone. No American submarine could have made that voyage.
Later that morning reporters caught up with Deutschland's captain Paul König when he presented his papers at the East Forwarding Company office. "What is there about my voyage to cause all this commotion?" König asked in fluent English, with only a hint of an accent. König and his British wife had lived in Winchester, England, before the war. He was fifty years old but looked older, as if his long career as a merchant marine officer had exposed him to enough sun and storm to etch a few extra years onto his face.
What he had accomplished would soon be common, he told reporters. Germany was building other large merchant submarines like the Deutschland that would maintain regular commercial service with the United States. In fact, one of them, the Bremen, would be arriving shortly. The British grip on German trade would soon be broken.
Although unused to the spotlight of the press, König proved a quick study. He presented himself as a simple sea captain, his crew as experienced sailors, and blockade-running as a learned skill. He did not want their accomplishment to be seen as extraordinary. Extraordinary accomplishments were not easily repeated, whereas submarine trips to the United States were.
"What about the British destroyers?" asked a reporter.
"The North Sea and the Channel were as crowded with destroyers and as well-lit as Broadway," König explained, but the Deutschland's sensitive microphones could detect the vibrations of ships. When one was detected, the submerged U-boat would stand still and quiet as a mouse, anchored fifty feet below the surface or resting on the sea floor. On those occasions "we drank good French champagne while we sang 'we've got rings on our fingers and bells on our toes,' and presently the destroyers gave us room on the roof and we came up and then went on to America. It was just as simple as that, I tell you."
Later that year, to capitalize on the publicity of the visit, König chronicled the rigors of his voyage in a hastily published book, The Voyage of the Deutschland: The First Merchant Submarine. It presented a more candid version of the dangers and discomforts that he and the crew faced on their voyage. Instead of champagne and singing on the channel floor, his submarine experienced an uncontrolled dive that buried its bow in the mud and projected its stern into the air. Fortunately for the crew there had been no prowling destroyers to take advantage of such an inviting target.
But aside from playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with British destroyers, the rigors of König's voyage to America resulted more from the boat and the weather than from the British blockade. In fact, unless the Royal Navy caught a U-boat on the surface, it could do precious little to stop a submarine. The depth charge had not yet been perfected. Submarine nets and floating mines posed a risk in certain concentrated areas, but failing that, the preferred method of combating the menace was to find the U-boat on the surface and ram it before it could submerge.
Although König tended to minimize his accomplishment, the American public saw it differently. The New York Times labeled the U-boat's arrival as "an incident that compels admiration and stirs the imagination." An adaptation of Jules Verne's immensely popular 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea had just appeared in the movie theaters, and it was hard to overlook a comparison between the fictional Captain Nemo in his futuristic submarine Nautilus with the daring, real-life Captain König in his extraordinary undersea freighter.
Suddenly Verne's imaginative tale no longer seemed so futuristic. U-boats had already redefined the nature of naval warfare. Great Britain had maintained its mastery of the sea for the past century by investing in battle cruisers and super dreadnaught battleships. Nations had viewed the submarine as a novelty that had no serious role in naval strategy. But in the opening days of the war, the submarine U-9 electrified the navies of the world by sinking three British armored cruisers in the space of an hour before they were even aware of their attacker's presence. Now submarine crews sipped champagne on the ocean floor and provided underwater shipping service.
Under the terms of its neutrality, the United States was permitted to trade with any of the belligerent countries, but its trade with Germany, which stood at $345 million in the year before the war, had dropped to virtually zero due to the British blockade. At the same time, the United States reaped great profit supplying goods to the Allies, including armaments. The United States was eager to resume trade with Germany as well, but British dominance of the seas prevented that. The Deutschland and other submersible freighters might well resume the flow of goods to Germany, which was precisely what the British feared.
For several weeks in the summer of 1916, the main stage in the U-boat war, the clash of two imperial powers to choke the trade of its adversary, and the competition for the sympathies of the neutral United States shifted from the North Sea to the port of Baltimore.
Warship or Freighter?
Britain was quick to protest that Deutschland's visit violated U.S. neutrality, a charge to which the United States was highly sensitive. Although most Americans favored the British cause in the war, America strongly resisted involvement. In an address to Congress at the outset of the war, President Wilson walked that tightrope.
The people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy and desire among them with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.
The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from America's U-Boats by Chris Dubbs. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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