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The Great War Society, incorporated in 1986, is committed to the study of the First WorldWar and subsequent world events associated with that cataclysm and their importance for our lives today. The journal of the Society, Relevance, is published quarterly. Annual seminars are held at various locations throughout the country, bringing together members, guests, and renowned scholars to discuss the events of the Great War in more depth. Information about our seminars and special events like our annual Armistice-Veterans Day commemorative will be available on the website, announced in and distributed in mailings. The Great War Society is a California nonprofit corporation and is exempt from income taxes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to The Great WarSociety are deductible to donors on their federal and state income tax returns. Also deductible are $30.00 of annual

Board of Directors:

Dana Lombardy, President

Thomas F. Olson, Secretary

Robert C. Denison, Treasurer

Salvatore Compagno,

East Bay Chapter Chairman

Jack P. Creighton, Director at Large

Robert J. Rudolph, San Francisco Chap. Chairman

Herbert P. Stickel, Director at Large

Robert H. Warwick, Membership Chairman

George E. Young, Jr., Director at Large

Mail: Inquiries, Membership and Submittals for Relevance: The Great War Society P.O. Box 18585 Stanford, CA 94309

Annual Membership:$49 - Receive Printed Version of Relevance$39 - Quarterly Online Download of Relevance

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Relevance

membership dues. Diane B. Rooney,

Director of Marketing

President Emeritus

A Message from Our PresidentNEW VISION ­ NEW MISSION ­ NEW RESOLVE

I want to say “hello” to all of my fellow Society members and to everyone who loves history – especially those who share an interest in the Great War.

In my interview on page 20 in this special double issue of Relevance, you can read about many of the new goals for our organization as it works towards the upcoming centennial celebrations from 2014-2019. One of the most important changes is what has happened to Relevance – it has more pages, more illustrations and more information. These improvements are due to the efforts of the journal’s new editor, Michael Hanlon. Mike’s extensive knowledge of the First World War and his considerable experience in writing and publishing are essential to helping us build awareness and education about this incredible period of history. We are very fortunate to have Mike in this key role.

We also have a new Mission Statement for The Great War Society that will help us focus our efforts (also p. 20) and we have started building a redesigned website that will engage the serious student of World War I as well as the casual visitor. As excited as I am about all of the new things our Society will be doing, they are only possible due to your support. This is the time of year to renew your membership or join us for the first time. A form and return envelope are included with this issue of Relevance, or you can pay online at:

www.the-great-war-society.org(Under Construction)

Together we can make a difference!

Dana Lombardy, PresidentThe Great War Society 2

Contents

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From the Editor:

Kimball Worcester, Assistant Editor Tony Langley, Contributing Editor

As our new President Dana Lombardy mentions in his message (p. 2), I've been asked to assume the editorship of issue. He has requested I provide high-quality content, covering every aspect of the First World War. For my first issue, I am lucky to inherit a fascinating article by Jan S. Breemer, Professor of National Security Decision Making at the U.S. Naval War College in Monterey, California. A noted expert on submarine warfare, particularly the Soviet and Russian fleets, he has provided a fascinating study of the birth of anti-submarine warfare in the First World War. I have supplemented Professor Breemer's two-part major article with new features for our readers: interviews (our first features the new GWS President), news from the battlefields, a trivia challenge, and in-depth reviews from Len Shurtleff (who has appeared on these pages before) for books and Andrew Melomet, who has been contributing film reviews to my monthly online newsletter, the St. Mihiel Trip-Wire, for five years. I hope you enjoy this first effort. MH

from The War of Nations, Vol. 40, July 17, 1915Cover: Anti-submarine mine detonated from British destroyer

Relevance with this

2 About the Great War Society

Three new monuments were dedicated recently in the Argonne Sector4 News from the Western Front

Our organization, membership, directors and President's Message

5 Feature Article - Defeating the U-boat, Part One: "We Are Losing the War" Jan S. Breemer A fresh look at the U-boat Campaign

20 Meet Our New President: Dana Lombardy Interviewed by GWS Marketing Director Diane Rooney Dana discusses his plans for organizational growth and preparing for the Great War's Centennial

23 Some of the Best of Our Website A diverse selection from the huge amount of information we provide online

29 Feature Article - Defeating the U-boat, Part Two: The Convoy System Jan S. Breemer Coming to terms with an unprecedented threat

42 Trivia Challenge: Recognizing Your War Poets A new feature to test your First World War knowledge

43 Book and Film Reviews Major Internet articles from Len Shurtleff of Len's Bookshelf and Andrew Melomet at Andy's Nickelodeon

47 The 90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive Map and key locations of America's greatest battlefield of the Great War

48 Documentary HistoryPresident Woodrow Wilson announces the Armistice

COPYRIGHT©2008 The Great War Society

Michael E. Hanlon, Editor

Recently, a series of events have been held in the Argonne region, north of Verdun, to honor the memory of those who fought in the region, especially in the great offensive of September 26 - November 11, 1918. Three new memorials have been dedicated and are pictured below. Inside the back cover of this issue of Relevance you find a map of the Meuse-Argonne area showing the later stages of the operation and the line at the Armistice. To find the location of each of these monuments on the map, just match the letter.

C. On October 4, 2008 in and around the village of Châtel-Chéhéry a series of events were held to remember the heroics of Alvin York of the 82nd Division of the AEF 90 years earlier. A historiceducation trail planned by the research team led by U.S. Army Lt. Col. Doug Mastriano was dedicated, just north of the town. The York family was alsohonored. Shown here (l-r) at one of the trail's key informational panels are Alvin York's son GeorgeYork, grandson Gerald York and his great-granddaughter Deborah York.

News From the Western Front90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive Commemorated

A. Near the small hamlet of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers east of the River Meuse, one minute before the Armistice, Baltimore's Sgt. Henry Gunther, 313th Inf., 79th Div., became the last American soldier to be killed in action during the war. Last September 24 this monument, raised on the initiative of Pierre Lenhard, a local historian, was unveiled by Jean-Marie Bockel, the French Secretary of State for Defense and Veterans near the site of Gunther's death.

B. The most remembered incident of America's Great War experience was the Lost Battalion, a collection of men from the 77th New York Division, under the command of Lt. Col. Charles Whittlesey, who were surrounded for five days on a hillside near the village of Binarville. This monument to their sacrifice was dedicated near the village on October 7. It also honors Cher Ami, the messenger pigeon who helped bring relief.

Photos by Christina Holstein & Doug Mastriano4

Presented by Permission of Jan S. Breemer All Rights Reserved by the Author

Part One: "We Are Losing the War"On April 10, 1917, Rear-Admiral William Sowden Sims, US Navy sat across from the Royal Navy's Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe. Sims and his aide had arrived in London on that same day, less than 24 hours after their passenger steamer had docked in Liverpool. While they were at sea, on April 6, the American Congress had declared war on Germany and its allies. Anticipating hostilities, U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels had ordered Sims to London to, in Sims' own words, "get in touch with the British Admiralty, to study the naval situation and learn how we could best and most quickly cooperate in the naval war." Now, sitting across from him - "calm, smiling and imperturbable" - was the First Sea Lord. With operational

responsibility for the entire British navy, Jellicoe was well placed to confirm the belief of Sims and most Americans that the British "had the situation well in hand." They did not. Sims was shocked to learn that the struggle against the U-boats had been far less successful than was being portrayed in the American and British newspapers. When he realized that the number of sinkings of British and neutral merchant-men was three and four times larger than reported, Sims observed, "It looks as though the Germans were winning the war." Jellicoe agreed. New, promising weapons, notably the depth charge, were being developed, but if the U-boats kept up their current pace of sinkings, they would not be ready in time. That was why it was critical

5

that the U.S. Navy immediately send help in the way of destroyers and other small vessels. After his meeting, Sims cabled Washington that, "Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are losing the war." He also warned U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels that reports of British tactical successes against the U-boats should be treated with a great deal of skepticism. He wrote: "Accept no reports of submarine losses as authentic and certain unless survivors are captured or the submarine itself definitely located by dragging." (emphasis in the original). The April report on monthly ship losses seemed to bear out Sims's fear. In what would turn out to be the peak month of the U-boats' productivity, 860,334 tons of shipping were sunk. Also, the exchange rate between the numbers of Allied ships lost versus U-boats sunk was, from the defender's perspective, the worst ever - 167:1.

Seventeen months later, in what historian Paul Halpern called a "curiously anticlimactic" occasion, the German submarine fleet raised the black flag of surrender. Between November 20 and December 1, 1918, 114 U-boats gave themselves up in British ports; more were seized in German harbors. In October, the last full month of the war, shipping losses had declined to 116,237 tons. As a result of this happy turn of events, wrote one British army officer, he and his fellow officers at the Allied headquarters in France had lacked only "certain material - particularly. . . chocolate, biscuits, and tinned fruits in the canteens."

How had the desperate situation Sims was 6 arrival of foodstuffs, war supplies, etc.told about in the spring of 1917 come to

pass? How was it possible that a craft that had shown its seaworthiness only two decades before and which, right up to the war, was still being dismissed by many naval officers as more dangerous to its own crew than its intended victim, had managed to effectively neutralize the most powerful fleet in the world? When it did, the submarine had overturned one of the most sacred tenets of the prevailing conception of sea power - the notion, expressed most cogently only a few years before by Alfred Thayer Mahan, that sea power was about command of the sea and that its possession turned on victory in a decisive battle between fleets of dreadnoughts. According to this dogma, the side that won command had accomplished two things simul-taneously: First, "owning" command meantthat the opponent could no longer use the sea for its purposes, e.g., ship goods and raw materials, or threaten seaborne landings; second, the side in command had the unfettered use of the sea for its own purposes, such as moving supplies and troops, launching attacks against the enemy shore and so forth. The tonnage war waged by the U-boats revolutionized naval warfare by rendering obsolete this basic principle of pre-World War I naval thinking. The transformation of naval warfare from the surface of the seas to the water column below served to bifurcate command of the sea. Britain in 1917 still controlled the seas in, as Sims put it, the "old Nelsonian sense" - its Grand Fleet of dreadnoughts kept its German High Seas counterpart in port, and the German merchant fleet had effectively disappeared from the oceans, but that same Grand Fleet could not guarantee the safety of Britain's own trade routes and ensure the

In the end, of course, the British and their allies did manage to defeat the U-boat's strategic goal of economic strangulation. The U-boat's defeat at the strategic level of war bears emphasizing because it can be argued with considerable force that the Allies never quite managed to defeat the German submarine fleet tactically or technically. True, U-boat losses in absolute terms went up very significantly in 1917 and 1918 from 22 in 1916 to 63 and 69 in 1917 and 1918, respectively. Much of this was due to the introduction of the depth charge and better mines. But these gains become less significant when it is realized that, thanks to new construction, the overall size of the U-boat threat remained fairly con-stant. (Table p. 17) Moreover, it stands to reason that the probability of a U-boat being detected and attacked successfully went up as more and more U-boats went to sea.

Countering the submarine's revolutionary impact on the old command-of-the-sea principle and restoring the ability to use the seas at acceptable cost called for equally revolutionary countermeasures. Those countermeasures had little to do with new weapons and technologies. Both did play a role, of course, notably the depth charge and hydroacoustic devices. These and other technological innovations, however, made a comparatively small contribution to the conceptual counterrevolution that was at the heart of the U-boat's final defeat. The defeat of the U-boat in World War I was made possible, first and foremost, by compromising what was arguably the very ethos of the naval profession, namely the belief that wars at sea were fought and won by aggressively seeking out and sinking the enemy.

"The Submarine Boat Does Not and Cannot Revolutionize Naval Warfare"

The submarine is history's first "absolute weapon." It is so because never before had a weapon been created that so much defied our scientific and ability to quickly produce a counterweapon. The submarine was the first weapon to go about its war-making business in the third dimension, producing an unprecedented challenge for the development of countermeasures.

Fighting ranges at the time the submarine appeared on the scene had expanded to thousands of yards, and the problem of hitting a moving ship from a platform that itself is moving was only barely being solved. The submarine's ability to navigate not only on a plane but also up and down, presented an even more complex fire-control problem - even for a visible target.

The submarine's invisibility - at least some of the time - and its ability therefore to move and attack unseen, posed an unprecedented problem for the traditional tools of naval power. In fact, there were two problems: First, how does a ship moving on the surface of the oceans defend itself against attack below the belt; second, if it survives an attack, how does it seek out and sink an unseen attacker? 7

"The Submarine Boat Is Absolutely Unattackable"

It was patently obvious, of course, that the problem of finding and destroying an enemy submarine could not be solved by another submarine. Very limited research toward solving the first half of the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) problem - detecting the submarine - had begun in the early 1890s and focused on developing a practical hydrophone. However, little progress was made during the next couple of decades; when war broke out, only a handful of ships had been fitted with a mix of British- and U.S.-made systems. Under favorable conditions, i.e. a calm sea with little wind and with the engines stopped, it was sometimes possible to actually hear a noisy U-boat. But these were rare occasions, and, in any case, the early devices were "omni-directional" systems, that is to say, they could not tell which direction the noise came from.

As far as destroying the submarine was concerned, efforts during the pre-war years were concentrated - naturally enough - on developing some sort of underwater explosive. Sea mines were already familiar weapons of war; many countries, including Great Britain, relied on shore-controlled minefields to protect ports and harbors. In Britain - as in the United States - this "static" defense of the coast with guns and minefields was the army's responsibility, the navy being left free to pursue would-be invaders on the high seas. This burden-sharing fully reflected the Royal Navy's self-image as a "blue water" force: It existed to seek out the enemy wherever he might be -

8not to be tied to the coast and wait for the

enemy to show up. This offensive ethos had difficulty accommodating mines. They were seen as defensive weapons and the "asymmetric" - and rather unsporting - resort of the weaker power.

Admiral Fisher told Prime Minister Asquith in a memorandum less than four months before war broke out:

(N)o word of a submarine destroyer has ever been heard because it has been forced upon us, by experience, that submarines cannot fight submarines, nor has any successful antidote been found even by the most bitter anti-submarine experts with unlimited means for experiments.

Although it was well known, on the eve of World War I, that the submarine of 1914 was capable of venturing much further out to sea than its first generation predecessor, it was still expected to busy itself mainly with defense against a would-be blockading fleet and with surreptitious, long-range scouting. Radio had improved considerably, and it was thought that forward-deployed submarines could give early warning of enemy fleet movements. Ironically, the submarine became the surveillance platform-of-choice, in part because, by 1914, its at-sea endurance was better than that of most destroyers. Most important, neither side - Britain or Germany - had given but the most fleeting thought that the submarine might be used against other than "legitimate" naval targets, i.e. gray hulls.

It has been suggested by some writers that the Admiralty's failure to prepare for a submarine anti-tonnage war was understandable in light of the prevailing

international attitude toward war among "civilized nations" - sinking unarmed merchantmen simply was "not done." Winston Churchill, then the Admiralty's First Lord (roughly the equivalent of minister of the navy) fairly summed up this attitude in a memo to Admiral Fisher, after the latter had written that Germany would likely use her submarines against Britain's commerce. Churchill thought his senior naval officer had written an "excellent" paper but that it was "to some extent, marred by the prominence" it gave to the idea of a U-boat commerce war. "I do not believe," he wrote, "this would ever be done by a civilized power." To emphasize his abhorrence, he suggested that, should the Germans go ahead anyway, this would justify brutal retaliatory measures, such as spreading pestilence, poisoning the water of the perpetrator's great cities and assassinating its leaders. Interestingly, in what seems to be a case of wishful thinking, some naval officers thought that the submarine's very inability to abide by the prize regulations meant that it could not and would not pose a threat to commerce.

The rejection of the idea that a civilized power would callously destroy private property on the high seas was certainly understandable - the concept of "total war" between nations, not just armies, had yet to be born. But this alone cannot explain Britain's dismal lack of preparedness. The fact of the matter is that, for the Royal Navy, the protection of commerce, be it against raiders on the surface of the sea or underneath, was an unglamorous, secondary and, worst of all, a defensive priority which, from the Admiralty's point of view, could

not interfere with what the service saw as its primary responsibility: seek out and battle the enemy's fleet. The Admiralty reluctantly acknowledged its responsibility for the safe arrival of overseas foodstuffs, but it made it patently clear that it would brook no political interference in its war preparations.

Until his retirement in 1910, Fisher in particular warned how swarms of U-boats would make the "Narrow Seas" quite untenable by conventional warships. One of his publicists, retired army colonel Charles à Court Repington, "leaked" Fisher's views in a series of journal articles in 1910, which concluded that, "there will be no place for any great ship in the North Sea." With what turned out to be a surprising prescience, he painted a submarine anti-tonnage campaign that would affect the ability to feed "some tens of millions," cause a great rise in food and fuel prices and very possibly food riots. Since nothing had been invented or built to defeat the U-boat, he wrote, "Nothing we can effect with naval means can, with any certainty, prevent German submarines from putting to sea when they please, and from appearing off our coasts at their own sweet will."

Few among the British naval leadership, though, subscribed to Fisher and Repington's bleak prognosis. Most appear to have shared then-Rear Admiral Jellicoe's view instead. It basically held that the U-boat would almost certainly make the planning and execution of a decisive fleet-against-fleet battle much more complicated, but that with enough energy and effort, the problem would be brought under control and the North Sea made safe for a modern-day Trafalgar. 9

The idea of using submarines to attack commerce was certainly known and discussed in professional journals. According to Germany's official account of the war at sea, the U-boat arm's younger officers - who were more familiar with the new diesel boats' capabilities - were particularly enthusiastic proponents. There is no evidence, however, that any formal planning took place before the war. Instead, pre-war planning for the U-boat flotillas was focused mainly on how they could best be used to create favorable conditions for a decisive fleet battle. Specifically, theU-boats were seen as the key to whittling down the numerically superior Grand Fleet to approximate parity (Kräfteausgleich) with the High Sea Fleet. Then, and only then, would the German dreadnoughts sally forth and engage their enemy counterparts in a modern-day Trafalgar. The only problem was that the British had come to the same conclusion: that the "Narrow Seas" would likely be a submarine and mine trap. The U-boats would soon take their toll among patrolling cruisers and destroyers, but the prize targets, the Grand Fleet's battleships and battle cruisers, kept their distance in northernmost Scotland.

The turn-of-the-century submarine was barely able to "keep the sea." Machinery and weapons frequently broke down

(the co-location of gasoline engines and unshielded electrical wiring did not help), the craft was blind when submerged (functional periscopes did not appear until after 1904), and together these two limitations made the vessel highly accident-prone. Matters were very different, however, on the eve of World War I: between 1904 and 1914 the submarine had become a reliable and seaworthy navigational and weapons-carrying platform. This is not an ex post facto assessment - in exercise after exercise during the immediate pre-war years, "lessons learned" by naval professionals on both sides of the North Sea highlighted the submarine's growing high-seas range and stamina.

Because the craft would spend most of the time on the surface, it was theoretically more susceptible to detection. Practically though, the risk was small. Exercises had repeatedly demonstrated that a submarine in an awash condition, i.e. with only the conning tower sticking out of the water, was extremely difficult to spot. Usually, the submarine made the "first detection" in plenty of time to disappear below the waves. Nevertheless, partly as the result of a series of disastrous collisions with surface ships, much was done prior to the outbreak of World War I to speed up the ability to submerge. Some of the early boats needed as much as 15 minutes, but by 1914 a diving time of five minutes or less had become standard for a boat when fully surfaced and about one minute from an awash condition. When submerged, the average submarine of 1904 could navigate to a depth of about 35 meters; ten years later, 50 meters was common. Even before the war started, the 10

technology was in hand to operate at the much greater depths that became practice by 1917. However, until the invention the depth charge, there was no obvious need for doing so.

In addition, the submarine's armament had become more lethal. Despite its comparatively high cost and indifferent performance during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, the torpedo had become firmly established as the boat's principal weapons system. The typical torpedo of 1914 was, like its predecessor of 1904, a "straight-runner" with pre-set guidance provided by a gyroscope. The weight of the warhead on the 1914 torpedo, too, was not much different from the 1904 model - about 200 pounds; a contact fuse was still the only means to trigger the device. Important improvements had come in speed and striking range.

The evolution of the submarine from a near-shore, low-endurance defensive weapon to an ocean-going offensive platform coincided with the maturation of wireless for reliable, long-distance communication. Very early in the war the Germans found that their equipment was far better than they themselves had thought. In early 1915, reliable ship-to-shore communications up to 140 nautical miles was possible. Not long afterward, radio contact up to 1,000 nautical miles was established, and, by the middle of 1915, U-boats maintained regular communications with their headquarters in Wilhelmshaven from as far away as the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Ironically, the very excellence of the U-boats' radio gear created an unexpected vulnerability in that it encouraged crews to engage in what Patrick

Beesley called "unduly garrulous" behavior. The result was that, starting in late 1914, the code-breakers of the British Naval Intelligence Division's "Room 40" supplied a steady stream of "strategic" intelligence about the U-boat fleet's strength and general whereabouts. This information was complemented, in the spring of 1915, by "radio plots" that marked the location of individual U-boats. These plots were the product of a chain of radio direction-finding stations that were erected along the coast of England and Ireland early in that year. Using the intersection of at least two radio bearings, plots were accurate to within a radius of 20 to 50 nautical miles. This kind of information would prove extremely useful for the routing of convoys, but it rarely, if ever, was accurate or timely enough to bring about a successful tactical prosecution by a "hunter-killer" sloop or destroyer.

Later in the war, when the U-boats seemed frightfully close to their goal of economic strangulation, Britain's chief of naval staff lamely defended the pre-war failure to innovate against the submarine by suggesting there had been no pressing need at the time. "(I)t should be remembered," he said, "that the submarine was in its infancy at the outbreak of war…" The problem was that, if the U-boat of 1914 was in its "infancy," anti-submarine warfare had yet to be born!

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The offensive ethos of the Royal Navy led to difficulties anticipating the use of defensive weapons against submarines. Admiral Roger Bacon reports in his post-World War I account of his command of the so-called “Dover Patrol,” how, before the war, mines were “viewed askance…since we, the strongest Power, always fostered the idea that it was our business to tempt the enemy to come out and fight, and not block him in."

Planning Defensive Measures Against Germany's U-boats

"As for the U-Boats, the Admiralty Says Little But Does Much"

sea became dramatically evident on September 22, 1914. On that day, a single

at Trafalgar. Julian Corbett wrote after the war how, "(N)othing that had yet occurred had so emphatically proclaimed the change that had come over naval warfare, and never perhaps had so great a result been obtained by means relatively so small."

The new asymmetric nature of war at

When Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, the Royal Navy boasted the world's most numerous submarine fleet - 77. France, with some 60 boats, took second place. Germany, by contrast, owned a grand total of only 28. Several were already obsolete, but the ten last-built boats (U19-28) were, without a doubt, superior to any foreign-built submarine. Sixteen additional U-boats were under construction, and additional orders were placed between August and November. If the diminutive size of this force alone is not proof that Germany's naval planners were not then thinking in terms of a major war against commerce, the following may be: almost until the very day war was declared, Germany's largest U-boat yard, the Germaniawerft, was negotiating - with

the approval of the naval staff - with the Greek government over the sale of five U-boats on order for Germany's own navy.

Limited numbers were one reason why it took some time for the submarine's revolutionary impact on war to be register-ed. The other reason was that, during the first six moths of the war, Germany used the U-boats mostly according to the "old," pre-revolutionary rules of sea warfare. That is to say, the U-boats were employed as "legitimate" weapons of war against "legitimate" targets of war, to wit, the enemy's fleet. Since this was precisely what the British had expected all along, the re- sults, though dramatic on occasion, fell far short of the goal of creating a more even balance of dreadnought power. For one 12

U-9 in Harbor After Its Successful Attack of September 22, 1914

submarine, the U-9, managed to sink, within one hour, three armored cruisers - Aboukir, Cressy, Hogue - on routine patrol in the North Sea. Over 2,500 men died - more than

thing, the Grand Fleet gave the U-boats few opportunities to stalk and attack its battleships. The Fleet had retreated to its anchorage at Scapa Flow in northernmost Scotland whence it made occasional "sweeps" into the North Sea. The daily routine of enforcing the distant blockade of Germany's ports and harbors was left to cruisers and destroyers. Many were older vessels, but even so, they were usually faster than a submarine and therefore difficult to approach for a favorable torpedo firing position. Of course, the very fact that fear of mines and submarines had compelled the Royal Navy's battleships to effectively vacate the Narrow Seas was itself an indication that the old Mahanian verity, which held that command of the sea rested with the biggest ships, had lost much of its meaning.

In a memorandum December 28, 1914, Kapitän zur See Zenker of the Naval Staff set forth the implications for Germany's naval strategy in general and the role of the U-boats in particular:

It has been demonstrated that our submarines have not succeeded now for a long time in gaining any results worthy of note, despite the fact that they have been making cruises for a long time and have carried them out with great boldness. In the future prosecution of the war we will therefore be able to count neither on an equality of strength before the battle due to the use of our light forces nor on the opponent's changing his strategy as long as we continue ours unchanged.

The question was this: if the British were unlikely to change their strategy, what changes could Germany make? In particular, how could the U-boats' surprisingly capable war-fighting potential be put to better use?

Stalemate on land and at sea, and the pros- pect of a long war in which economic and financial endurance would overshadow prowess on the battlefield as the arbiter of war, set the stage for a major and fateful redefinition of Germany's submarine stra-tegy. Thanks to the invention of the submarine, commerce warfare, so long disdained by naval strategists in and out of uniform as "a delusion, and a most danger- ous delusion, "displaced the"decisive battle" as the centerpiece of naval strategic think-ing. The immediate trigger for the three-month-long debate that followed between Germany's naval and political leadership was the British announcement on October 2, 1914, that in order to protect cross-Chan- nel traffic against U-boats the eastern approach to the Channel had been barred with a minefield. During the first month af-the declaration of war, 2,764 mines wereplanted, and 4,390 were laid during the firstweeks of February the following year.

A Denkschrift by the commander of the U-boat forces, Korvettenkapitän Hermann Bauer, framed Germany's fateful debate. He called for immediate retaliation by using the underwater weapon against British commerce. His superior officers at the High Seas Fleet and on the admiralty staff were sympathetic. The commander of the 2nd Battle Squadron, Admiral Reinholdt Scheer, insisted that if this new and powerful

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weapon was going to be used to full effect, it must be done "in the way most suited to its peculiarities," i.e. without warning and without sparing the crews of the victimized steamers. But while the navy's uniformed leadership were naturally focused on the potential military effectiveness of a ship-sinking offensive, the country's political leadership worried about the possible political consequences, especially the reaction of the neutral countries, first and foremost the United States. Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg told the navy that there were no legal objections to a commerce campaign but that a decision to go ahead should await a stronger German military position on land. In the event, Germany need not worry how the neutrals might react. Scheer's comment written after the war fairly sums up the navy's frustration: "Enemies on all sides! That was the situation."

The pressure to find an alternative military solution to the stalemate on land continued. In the Reichstag, Bethmann Hollweg came under strong criticism for hindering the U-boats and being soft on the British. The press, too, clamored for retaliation against Britain's "illegal" blockade. On November 21 Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the "father" of the High Seas Fleet, asked an American reporter the rhetorical question whether Germany did not have as much right as the British opponent to "starve us out" and retaliate by "by torpedoing any of their ships and their Allies' ships…" Bethmann Hollweg reluctantly conceded on February 1, 1915. The High Sea Fleet's commander-in-chief, Admiral Von Pohl, had assured him that the U-boats would

have no difficulty telling enemy from neutral vessels and that, just to make sure, very specific the rules of engagement (ROEs) would be issued. Two days later, the announcement came that, starting February 18, all the waters around the British Isles and the Channel would be a "war zone" in which all enemy ships would be destroyed and neutrals would "navigate at their peril." American protests quickly compelled the Germans to exempt all neutral vessels, hospital ships and Belgian Relief vessels.

The U-boat's restrictive ROEs had effectively eviscerated the kind of anti-commerce campaign originally envisaged. Strategically, the exemption of neutrals meant that roughly 30 percent of British seagoing trade was immune from attack. Tactically, this translated into a much less "target-rich environment" for the U-boats. Also, the requirement that the U-boat commander make sure of the national identity of a ship before it could be sunk made his task much more complicated. On the one hand, his instructions told the captain that his "first consideration is the safety of the submarine." Yet, the ROEs told him he could carry out his mission only after he had come to the surface and made a positive identification of the ship's nationality at close range, i.e. enemy gun range. It did not take the British long to exploit this contradiction.

The U-boat order of battle at the start of what became known as the First Offensive stood at about 30, a net increase of two since the start of the war.

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U-boat Supply at Sea

As it became increasingly evident [to the British] that the war would last at least another year and that the U-boats' activities would amount to more than a "nuisance," "special measures" were being taken. They were of two kinds - first, immediate measures using existing technologies and capabilities to, if not destroy the submerged enemy, at least limit his freedom of maneuver and effectiveness. These steps would hopefully keep the U-boats' depredations to a tolerable level, while science and technology would try to find a long-term solution by way of new kinds of weapons and, more important, means of detection. Underlying this overall strategy was the assumption that the only way to defeat the U-boat menace was by sinking it.

When it became evident that Germany's shipyards had embarked on a massive submarine building program, there could be little doubt that the U-boats would be much more than a tactical nuisance, which, after some difficulties, could be dealt with by the navy's professionals. This was a strategic problem that defied the tried-and-proven methods of war on the sea. If the submarine represented a novel form of warfare, then a systematic defensive effort for the long haul called for equally novel countermeasures whose nature lay as yet outside the experience of the professional naval officer.

15Research for Professor Breemer's article was made possible thanks to a grant from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.

[Ed. note: We intend to present a full exposition of theU-boat boat war, which involved four separate campaigns, in a future issue. Here we break in Professor Breemer's original article and pick it up in 1916 when Germanyis moving fatefully to the last phase, unrestricted submarine warfare.]

British Countermeasures

As Günter Krause, author of U-Boot Alarm, put it, the U-boat's second offensive had met with few improvements in both the technical or tactical quality of British ASW measures. On the weapons side, the first depth charges were issued to the fleet and the Auxiliary Patrol in January 1916. They would not prove effective until more than a year later. Initial production runs were so small that the ships that were lucky enough to get any weapons at all were provided with only two. Even if more ordnance had been available, the lack of a reliablemeans of detection ensured that the "probability of kill" stayed extremely low. As long as "targeting" a U-boat depended mainly on where it was last seen, any chance of success for a craft carrying only a couple of depth charges meant that it had to almost literally be on top of the enemy, i.e. within 140 feet. It took the introduction of hydrophones and, more important, larger load-outs for saturation attacks, for the depth charge to eventually become the single most productive U-boat "killer" in World War I.

On the tactical side of the ASW ledger, British efforts in 1916 can best be characterized as more of the same. The minefields in the Straits of Dover were strengthened, more nets were added, additional decoy ships entered service, and more and more vessels of various types joined the coastal auxiliary patrols. By the end of the year, nearly 3,000 vessels were patrolling the U-boat infested waters. The patrols were concentrated mainly along the so-called "approach routes" or "focal

The overarching aim of the 1916 [second] campaign had been to choke off Britain's economic lifeline and force it to the peace table. Two considerations played a role: first, retaliation for Britain's illegal Hungerblockade. Britain's foreign secretary Grey's announcement before Parliament in January 1916 of what effectively amounted to a total economic blockade of Germanyset off a storm of public and military demands to "unshackle" the U-boats. Next, the current fleet buildup, which added an average of six new boats each month, had opened a window of opportunity to make a possibly decisive impact on British trade. The naval staff claimed that if the U-boats could sink a monthly average of about 630,000 tons of shipping, it would take six to eight months to bring Britain to its knees. Bethmann Hollweg was not impressed. His calculations showed that Britain needed a monthly import of cereals of only about 15,000-16,000 tons - an amount that called for only a handful of ships. Furthermore, he 1916, the navy seemed to have ignored the possibility of increased enemy countermeasures, including - ironically - convoying. His cabinet colleague, finance minister Karl Helfferich joined in, pointing out that the navy's claim that additional American financial aid would not help Britain, presumed that an "iron curtain" of U-boats could isolate the island from the rest of the world. Even the navy itself, he said, counted on a slow and gradual reduction of enemy tonnage. In the end though, it was the fear of a final break with the United States that had again forced the navy to settle for a less-than-all-out campaign in 1916.

wrote in a memormandum, dated February 29,

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points" of merchant shipping. This was where the broad oceanic lanes became narrow funnels and where it was thought the need to protect shipping was greatest and the presence of submarines most likely. There was nothing wrong with this reasoning but just because the problem was understood, did not mean it could be solved. This is evident from one hunt-and-kill operation in September 1917: For seven days, two, perhaps three, U-boats sank more than 30 merchantmen in an area off the south coast of England that was being watched over by 49 destroyers, 48 torpedo boats and 168 armed auxiliaries. During this time, the underwater enemy was actively hunted by 13 destroyers and seven Q-ships-- no results were achieved.

ASW productivity during the U-boats' 1916 campaign had actually declined compared with the year before. All things being equal therefore, the chances of an encounter and, by inference, a kill, should have been substantially greater by least twice. One reason why this was not the case was that the arming of merchant vessels had made the U-boats far more cautious in approaching their intended victim. Torpedoes were used more frequently; if not, the boats tended to stand off beyond gun range and use light signals or warning shots to force surrender. If the ship answered with gunfire, the U-boats, which were now being armed with a mix of two 88mm and 105mm guns, could respond in kind and stand a fair chance of out-shooting the merchantman's 12-pounder or 4-inch cannon. Alternatively, it could submerge, which an experienced crew could now accomplish in about one minute.

On the U-boats' side of the ledger, productivity fell far short of the naval staff's goal of 630,000 tons per month. Between March and May, the boats accounted for 215 British vessels with an aggregate tonnage of almost 480,000. This number averaged out to about the same monthly loss rate of the year before, but due to other pressures on shipping, losses had become more difficult to absorb. There was a growing Allied, including French, Italian, and Russian, demand for shipping; the supply needs of British forces on the Western Front had skyrocketed, and the output of shipyards had declined due in part to the Royal Navy's needs for the repair and construction of its vessels. The numbers are telling. During the first quarter of 1916, 325 British ships were lost from all causes; the yards produced 93 new vessels. Two hundred and seventy-one vessels were lost in the second quarter; the yards completed 113. All in all, the overall quandary for British shipping in the spring of 1916 can be summed up as this: how to meet the growing demand for war-related carrying capacity with a merchant fleet that was steadily declining in numbers and tonnage!

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Size of Germany's U-boat Fleet

● 4 August, 1914: 28 ● 1 January, 1916: 133 ● 1 January, 1917: 142 ● 1 January, 1918: 134 ● 11 November, 1918: 134

At the time of the armistice, 11 November 1918229 U-boats were under construction.

By Year

The third - restricted - U-boat offensive lasted from October 1916 to January 1917. During the last quarter of 1916, monthly sinkings exceeded 300,000 tons for a total of 963,863 tons and 554 ships. To put this in perspective, this was close to the tonnage sunk during the entire preceding year (1,189,031 tons). Several developments made these favorable returns possible. One hundred and eight boats were added to the fleet in 1916 - nearly five times as many as the number of boats lost (23). Next, larger boats - U-boat "cruisers" - permitted more distant operations, beyond the reach of the coastal auxiliary patrols. Boats were now found in the Bay of Biscay from France's Atlantic coast down to Portugal, in the Arctic Sea, and even, on one occasion, off the east coast of the United States.

The rapidly escalating shipping losses in the winter of 1916-17 brought home to Britain's political-military leadership for the first time the fact that it faced a national crisis that could make or break the war. The country's supply of wheat was down to 14 weeks. Worse, the Admiralty had effectively come to the conclusion that it had no answer to the problem.

The seemingly unending litany of military setbacks --the Dardanelles fiasco, the failed Somme offensive, the disappointing outcome of Jutland, and now the U-boat crisis all contributed to the fall of the Asquith cabinet in December. One of the first decisions of the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, was to institute an inner "War Cabinet," which would hopefully streamline the country's unwieldy political-military decision-making process. With himself at the head, Lloyd George

appointed Maurice Hankey (later Lord Hankey) as its secretary. At its first meeting, on December 9, a Shipping Controller was appointed to give central direction to what had heretofore been the work of a mostly ad hoc collection of agencies that had sprung up during the war to deal with the emergency of the day. Changes were made at the Admiralty as well. Jellicoe was relieved of his command of the Grand Fleet and made First Sea Lord. Jellicoe fully agreed with Lloyd George that defeating the U-boats was the number one priority. As a first step, he brought in one of his Grand Fleet subordinate commanders, Rear-Admiral Alexander Ludovic Duff, to head up a new Anti-Submarine Division. The new organization was to coordinate and stimulate all means of defeating the U-boat danger, but Jellicoe's memoirs make patently clear his very traditional and limited understanding of what exactly "defeating the U-boats" meant. "Our object," he wrote,

. . .was to destroy submarines at a greater rate than the output of the German shipyards. This was the surest way of counteracting their activities. It was mainly for the purpose of attack on the submarines that I formed the Anti-Submarine Division of the Naval Staff.

Even as war was still being fought according to the Prize Regulations, the steadily escalating toll that was being exacted portended worse to come. In the words of one German historian, the threat of an unrestricted onslaught hung over the British isles like the "sword of Damocles." 18

"The Most Tremendous Undertaking"The decision to cut the thin thread that held the sword was made on January 9, 1917 at a crown council held at the kaiser's residence in Pless, Silesia. February 1 was set as the date for opening the campaign. All shipping, enemy and neutral, including passenger ships, would be liable to attack without warning. Over 100 U-boats stood poised to launch what Scheer labeled, "The most tremendous undertaking that the world-war brought in its long train."

The aim was no less than to compel Britain to sue for peace within five to six months. The Germans had done their homework which had produced this estimate. A team of civilian economic, financial and maritime experts, commissioned by the naval staff, had calculated that, if the U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of shipping each month, and if 40 percent of neutral shipping could be frightened into staying in port, five months would suffice to reduce the amount of shipping for Britain's supply needs by 39 percent. This, the group predicted, would amount to an "unacceptable loss." As matters turned out, the basic statistics were sound. Accurate also was the calculation that the United States would likely join Germany's enemies, but that it would take 18 months for its vast resources to be fully mobilized - presumably far too late to rescue the British. The fatal flaws in the calculations were certain underlying premises and assumptions, for example, the belief that the British "political system" was incapable of imposing onerous food rationing.

The naval leadership, too, had its assumptions. Holtzendorff was convinced that, if his U-boats could dispatch 300,000

to 400,000 tons of shipping to the bottom of the sea each month despite the Prize Regulations, it should manage 600,000 tons without those restrictions. At the base of the navy chief of staff's confidence was the belief that increased U-boat losses due to improved enemy countermeasures would be more than offset by new additions. Implicit in this estimate was the assumption that enemy defensive improvements would be slow and evolutionary - more ships, more mines, etc. No thought seems to have been given to the possibility of a British "breakthrough" solution that might, somehow, defeat the 600,000 tons-per-month goal. The German navy's propaganda had painted the U-boat as an unbeatable, victorious "wonder weapon;" a British countermiracle within the next six months was unimaginable.

Holtzendorff's expectations seemed well founded in the first few months of the unrestricted campaign. In February, worldwide shipping losses climbed to about 500,000 tons; in March to some 540,000; and in April, the Allies' worst - over 840,000 tons disappeared. This averaged to just about the 600,000 tons per month the German navy had calculated would be necessary bring Britain to its knees. Since the output of British shipyards was far less than the losses, the only way for the country to make ends meet was to impose further import restrictions. In February, cuts amounting to 500,000 tons a month in com-modities ranging from luxury items, such as coffee and silk clothing, to basic foods and raw factory materials, was announced The supply of basic foodstuffs at this time was estimated to last six weeks at best. 19 Part II of Jan S. Breemer's article begins on page 29.

THE GREAT WAR SOCIETYMISSION STATEMENT

Since 1986, the purposes of The Great War Society have been to study all aspects of World War I and to promote a greater understanding of this catastrophic conflict and its profound and lasting effects on subsequent generations. To achieve these goals, the organization focuses on three main activities that involve the work of volunteers, charitable contributions, and sponsorships.

EDUCATION through collection and dissemination of information via publications, lectures and seminars. We increase awareness of the Great War through our web site

www.the-great-war-society.org and through our quarterly publication called Relevance, and we have held fifteen major seminars in the U.S. that often featured speakers from around the world.

PRESERVATION of records, artifacts and monuments. We work closely with such organizations as the National World War One Museum in Kansas City, the U.S. Oise-Aisne Cemetery in France, and others.

TRANSLATION of non-English materials & TRANSCRIPTION of letters and diaries. We promote and make available translations and transcriptions prepared by our members, scholars and students to support a broader understanding of the Great War.

Meet Our New President: Dana LombardyBy Diane B. Rooney, Marketing Director, The Great War Society

Society President Dana Lombardy

Dana Lombardy was elected the third president of The Great War Society in August 2008, succeeding Sal Compagno, who became President Emeritus and head of the San Francisco area East Bay Chapter. In this conversation, Dana introduces him-self to members, prospective members, and the larger Great War community and discusses his wide-ranging historicalinterests and the group's plans for expanding the Society and preparing for the Great War's Centennial.

Since 1972, Dana has worked as a researcher, consultant, cartographer, designer, editor, speaker and writer on more

than 100 military history projects. He has appeared as an on-camera expert in multiple epi-sodes of the History Channel series "Tales of the Gun" and numerous other television documentaries.

Dana narrated three audio programs on London available as podcasts on the web, sponsored by VisitBritain.com, BritishHeritage.com and HistoryNet. His most recent books include Historic Photos of Los Angeles, Historic Photos of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and two books on Civil War artist Keith Rocco. Dana was the founder and organizer of Celebrate History, a unique event that brought together people interested in all periods of history for lectures, panels, displays, demonstrations, and re-enactments. He is also a frequent presenter at historical and strategic gaming conventions including GenCon, Historicon, and KublaCon.

Dana and his wife, Anne Merritt, who also loves history, reside in Oakland, CA in a spacious live/work space that serves as home, office, and warehouse. Our interview:

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Where and how does the Great War fit into these interests?

DR: Dana, your interests in history are expansive in time.

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DR: How is The Great War Society doing these days?

DL: I was honored when the Board asked me if I was interested in helping the Society as its new President. I saw it as a chance to infuse the organization with some of the ideas I had developed at Celebrate History and with other organizations.

It seems these days every organization struggles to maintain itself, let alone grow. We're going through a major reassessment and reinvigoration of what we want to be. To help TGWS thrive, we're currently implementing several changes, including a new, focused mission statement (see p. 20), a totally new website that lets people join or renew online, and a simplified dues structure. We've asked Michael Hanlon to become editor of Relevance, to return that publication to its former glory and continue to improve our communications programs.

We've begun supporting the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, through financial contributions and by holding our Seminar there. We have other exciting projects in the works that we'll be announcing over the next few issues of Relevance.

DR: So it sounds like TGWS wants to reach out and engage new and more diverse groups and get them involved?

DL: Yes, we want to reach a more diverse membership. This could include all types of gamers, genealogists, re-enactors, recent veterans and active military, teachers/professors, and just thoughtful people in general who want to deepen their understanding of, for example, the current map of the Middle East or how the women's suffrage movement came about.

DR: With the approaching centennial of the war's start, what is TGWS doing to remember and honor it?

DL: We've started our planning for 2014-2019. We aim to be the leading source for public and media information on the Great War as we move toward the centennial. I noticed that U.S. and international coverage of the 90th anniversary this month was quite

comprehensive, especially with a focus on the personal stories of the last few veterans. I believe this interest will continue to build in the coming years. It did so for the Civil War centennial in 1961 through 1965, and interest and involvement in the Civil War has remained strong in the forty years since then.

DR: What are the greatest challenges facing the TGWS?

DL: There are millions of people interested in history who don't know that the organization exists. One of my most important jobs is to make them aware of TGWS, that we have an exciting story to tell and preserve, and that they can help.

Everyone interested in the Great War can contribute by joining or renewing their membership, even if they are unable to attend a local meeting or a national seminar. We want their opinions and their participation in deciding how their membership money will be used to preserve, honor, and respect the past, and what projects we support. It all starts with joining.

We've started to reach out to a wide range of related organizations. These include the Western Front Association (USA branch), the League of World War I Aviation Historians, the Society for Military History, and the National World War I Museum, among others. There is a vast network of contacts out there to work with and build upon.

DR: Are there other projects related to our communications, our journal and website?

DL: Yes, in addition to the new website, we've expanded Relevance and made it available in traditional print format and digitally as well. These options are worked into the pricing of the membership packages. I think this makes better use of members' funds.

DR: Are there other new ideas the Society is considering?

DL: Yes, one is returning to a joint Seminar with the WFA-USA. Their new president, Doran Cart, is Curator of the National World War I Museum. They've invited us to jointly sponsor a Seminar at the Museum in September 2009. This combination helps both organizations as well as raises the profile of the Museum. Another is looking at shorter, newsletter-type communications that would come out between the quarterly issues of Relevance, and exploring all the new media from blogs to podcasts to social networking communities. The WFA-USA is already doing some of that.

DL: I first became aware of The Great War Society in 1998, through the first Celebrate History. My major interests prior to that were the Civil War, World War II, and the Napoleonic era. I was excited to join TGWS because World War I had such a gigantic impact on events both then and subsequently, down through World War II and our own day.

Pershing Square, Washington D.C., Fall 2008

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DR: From 1996 to 2000, you published Napoleon Journal, an international publication devoted to the study of the wars of the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon. You also published Conflict magazine in the 1970s. What things did you learn about marketing history and engaging people that are relevant to TGWS?

DL: That there are millions of people who love history. Often their focus is on their family or a particular period, but they respond enthusiastically to much more when there's a good story that's well presented. We need to figure out how to engage them with our best stories, well told.

DR: Dana, you've designed more than a dozen war games and contributed to at least two dozen more. Streets of Stalingrad won an Origins Award in 1980. You're a frequent presenter at a range of gaming conventions and know that market. How can TGWS build bridges to the gaming community?

DL: Well, as a game designer, I analyze history to identify how to present it in a successful game. That's essentially what real world analysts do in today's crises. Games present information in a totally new way. Not just the names, dates, and numbers, but the story and why it's important. Gamers will play in any period from ancient through fantasy futures, because for them the exciting part is the chance to be the decision maker, to consider the impact of changed history, and to challenge themselves. It's completely involving and engaging. I've got some ideas about how we can do that for World War I.

DR: You're also an Associate Editor at Armchair General Online. What can we learn from and how can we work effectively with websites that provide online and printed materials as well as community and social networking?

DL: The Internet is a revolution that has changed everything we do and how we do it in the last ten years. The bad news is that anyone who can type thinks they can be an instant expert. But the good news is that an incredible amount of information from archives and libraries is now accessible on the web. Also, in terms of getting our message out there, we can reach thousands of

Also, I just returned from Washington, D.C., where I had the opportunity to visit Pershing Square, with its statue of the general and marble wall memorializing the American Expeditionary Force. This is the closest thing to an American World War I monument, but because it's not located at or near the Mall where the other monuments are located, it doesn't get as much attention and is in need of restoration. I see it as my job, my duty, to help preserve and promote this monument so neither the people who served in the Great War nor their cause are forgotten.

DR: Any final words?

DL: I urge everyone who loves history, who especially want to preserve World War I history, to help us by renewing their membership or joining TGWS for the first time. Our new vision, our new mission, and our new start is only possible with their support.

DR: Do you have any favorite WWI books and films?

DL: Among books I would have to mention Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919, Thomas Fleming's Illusion of Victory, and G .J. Meyer's A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. Among films, All Quiet on the Western Front, after all these years, in both versions, is still incredibly moving.

people around the world electronically, in engaging, interactive formats, for little cost. Armchair General's experience with that model is a great example for us to follow.

DR: Can you sum up your interest in history and its importance?

DL: What I said in my two Historic Photographs books is still true. For me, history has always been about the people and their stories that made the world we know. I am also interested in how things work, why people made certain decisions, and how different choices could have led to possible alternatives. We are the result of history, and we live with and are making history every day. The current conflicts in the Middle East are just the most striking example of living with the consequences of the Great War.

www.the-great-war-society.org

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In this issue of Relevance, we present features from our Members' Contribution site and our treatment of the Italian Front, La Grande Guerra. We have tried to reflect the look of each of the uniquely designed sections. Please visit our website, as these pages are but representative of thousands of items you can examine online. MH

For nearly a decade, the Great War Society has been building a huge website--actually a network of sites--to further interest and education in the events of 1914-1918. It has received many awards and citations as "Best" in subject over the years. Starting with this issue of Relevance we are going to share some of the best and most interesting articles we provide on the Internet with you readers. We have tried, at least when we started out, to cover aspects of the war that seemed to be neglected. The first of these was our feature on the AEF, the Doughboy Center, which has won many of the honors mentioned above. We later added features on the Italian Front, the Near East, France during the war, and the legends and traditions of the conflict. We also provide an extensive collection of contributions from our members and a comprehensive list of books and films for students of the war, but there is even more. We have formed "alliances" with some of the most outstanding websites existing. These include: the most famous of them all, Trenches on the Web, the the creation of the late Mike Iavarone, who was a member of the Great War Society; Great War in a Different Light, the greatest collection of images from the war possibly ever assembled from our friend Tony Langley of Antwerp, andLinks Central, the largest available collection of World War I Internet click-on links, which I produce for our sister organization, the Western Front Association, U.S. Branch. Our website is being redesigned at this time, but our content is fully accessible. The graphic below will give you the flavor of what is available through our "Learning and Research Center" at our new home page:

Surrounding Area from Central Gorizia

War correspondent E. Alexander Powell described Gorizia and the surrounding area:

From the Great War Society's Website

STOP XXXVI GORIZIA

The city of Gorizia lies on the River Isonzo at the foot of the Julian Alps and has ancient origins. It was the capital city of a province of the Austro- Hungarian Empire and flourished until the outbreak of the First World War, which reduced it to rubble. It was captured by troops of Italian army in August 1916, and became part of Italy postwar. Occupied by Slovenepartisans at the end of WWII, the city was returned to Italian rule in 1947. The Eastern suburbs, the part now called Nova Gorizia, was ceded to Yugo- slavia and today lies in Slovenia.

At the northern end of the Carso, in an angle formed by the junction of the Wippach and the Isonzo, the snowy towers and black-brown roofs of Gorizia rise above the foliage of its famous gardens. The town, which resembles Homburg or Baden-Baden and was a popular Austrian resort before the war, lies in the valley of the Wippach (Vippacco the Italians call it), which

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separates the Carso from the southernmost spurs of the Julian Alps. Down this valley runs the railway leading to Trieste, Laibach, and Vienna. It will be seen, therefore, that Gorizia is really the gateway to Trieste, and a place of immense strategic importance. On the slopes of the Carso, four or five miles to the southwest of the town, rises the enormously strong position of Monte San Michele, and a few miles farther down the Isonzo, the fortified hill-town of Sagrado. On the other side of the river, almost opposite Gorizia, are the equally strong positions of Podgora and Monte Sabotino. Their steep slopes were slashed with Austrian trenches and abristle with guns which commanded the roads leading to the river, the bridge-heads, and the town. To take Gorizia until these positions had been captured was obviously out of the question. Here, as elsewhere, Austria held the upper ground. In a memorandum issued by the Austrian General Staff to its officers at the beginning of the operations before Gorizia, the tremendous advantage of the Austrian position was made quite clear: "We have to retain possession of a terrain fortified by Nature. In front of us a great watercourse; behind us a ridge from which we can shoot as from a ten-story building."

Gorizia Castle

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The center of the old town is dominated by the castle, built sometime after 1000 AD by the Counts of Gorizia on the site of a prehistoric "Castelliere" and where later a Roman lookout tower was added. In Slovene "Gorica" means "small mountain" referring to the castle hill. The castle today holds a museum of history and art as well as a First World War Museum.

In 1500 Gorizia came into the possession of the Hapsburg monarchy to whose fortunes and misfortunes it remained tied, except for a brief period of the Venetian domination and Napoleonic occupation, until the end of World War I, when it became Italian.

During the Great War, Gorizia was a strategic objective of the Italian Army and was the object of many assaults before it was finally captured on August 8, 1916. The nearby Carso Plateau was the site of tens of thousands of deaths for the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies. The city was abandoned by the Italians during the Battle of Caporetto and retaken late in 1918 at the time of the Armistice.

Today Gorizia is an industrial, commercial, transport, and tourist center. Manufactures include textiles, leather goods, processed food, and machines.

Visit www.worldwar1.com/itafront/ to read our articles on the Italian Front of World War I, including our Virtual Tour of the Front, which is still under development.

Italian Troops Entering the City

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From The Great War Society Members' Contributions Website

My Father, John Giles Farquharof

25 Squadron, RAFBy John W. (Jack) Farquhar, M.D.

My father, John Giles Farquhar, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on July 13, 1897and raised there. He joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and by 1918 had earn- ed a lieutenant's commission and his pilot's wings with the RAF. He was assigned to 25 Squadron, flying a DH-9 on bombing and reconnaisance missions. He was shot down once and survived, but his observer was killed.

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Dad in His Trench Coat with His DH-9 (Other Men in Photo Not Identified)

After the war, he returned home, renewed his athletic career and earned recogni-tion as one of the finest hockey goalies of his era. His subsequent career also involved sports, both coaching and operating sporting businesses. His interests brought the family to America, first to the University of Wisconsin, then Passdena,

My uncle Charles also served in the Canadian Army. He was four years older than my father and chose to stay in England after the war, where he became an exporter of Scotch whiskey.

Great War Society member Dr. Jack Farquhar is a Professor Emeritus at the Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. All members of the Society are entitled to their own web page for presenting any topic related to the war.

Visit: www.worldwar1.com/tgwscontr/

to see what other members have presented.

California. He passed away in 1974.

Charles Malcolm Farquhar,Quartermaster Corps, C.E.F.

Presented by Permission of Jan S. Breemer All Rights Reserved by the Author

Part Two: The Convoy SystemThe huge British anti-submarine defensive effort so far was clearly a shambles. Writing in his diary on February 8, 1917, Sir Maurice Hankey admitted that it looked like our "our military effort would so far exhaust us that we cannot maintain our sea power and our economic position." He consoled him-self that his country seemed at least to be sinking "a good many submarines." He was wrong. In February, the Germans lost five U-boats, four of which were due to enemy action. In March and April, another four boats fell victim to mines and other hostile causes. In other words, 1,104 ships were sunk at the cost of nine attackers!

The Royal Navy's mainstay strategic scheme so far for giving in- and outbound shipping at least a modicum of protectionwas rapidly unraveling. Involved here was

the so-called "approach areas" strategy. This protective system had been introduced off the south coast of Ireland in the summer of 1915, but had gradually expanded to three "great cones of approach" in which oceanic shipping converged on Britain's ports. The scheme called for inbound shipping to be routed along - very thinly patrolled - approach routes until they arrived in Home Waters and could benefit from the more heavily patrolled inshore routes. Outbound shipping followed the reverse procedure. The system worked reasonably well while the U-boats operated relatively near shore; it fell apart, when the larger boats sought their prey some 200 nautical miles further west where patrol coverage was thin or non-existent and the approach routes converged towards the protected inshore lanes. These so-called "danger areas" of some 10,000 to

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15,000 square miles quickly became death traps from which 25 out of every 100 steamers that left Britain in the spring of 1917 failed to return. As the Minister of Shipping wrote after the war, they had become the "graveyard of British shipping." Even the Admiralty was compelled to admit at the end of March that, despite all efforts, the attack had outstripped the defense, with no solution in sight. The implication was obvious: ". . .the end of the war could be fixed with arithmetical precision at no very distant date."

Insurgents in the Admiralty

One of Winston Churchill's most memorable phrases of World War II pays tribute to the young men who won the Battle of Britain and thereby arguably kept the country from German invasion. "Never in the field of human conflict," the Prime Minister said on August 20, 1940, "was so much owed by so many to so few." With only a slight exaggeration, the same might be said of two relatively junior Royal Navy officers who bucked the "system" to catalyze the convoy revolution, which haltedthe slide to seemingly inevitable defeat. Their names have become footnotes at best in most histories of the U-boat campaign, but had it not been for their willingness to question - at considerable risk to their careers - the prevailing assumptions and "facts" about the conduct of the anti-U-boat war, the actual solution to the U-boat problem, i.e. the convoy system, might never have been adopted. The two were Commander (later Admiral Sir) Reginald Henderson and Captain (later Vice Admiral) Kenneth G. B. DeWar. Both worked in the

Admiralty - Henderson in the Anti-Submarine Division, DeWar in the Operations Division. It is not clear from the evidence which of the two took the initiative, the problem being, in part, that the accounts of their experience are curiously similar. In any event, between the two, it was discovered that (a) the attrition to British shipping was far greater than the public statistics suggested and (b) the actual number of ocean-going ships arriving at and sailing from British ports was much smaller than was advertised, making the provision of convoy escorts a much more manageable undertaking than had been claimed by the Admiralty.

Both officers reportedly turned to the newly created Ministry of Shipping, when they found that the Admiralty itself could not provide reliable statistics about the comings and goings of overseas shipping. Henderson supposedly went looking in connection with his responsibility for organizing the "controlled" sailings of the cross-Channel coal trade to France. Practically speaking, these were convoys, but the Admiralty was evidently not quite ready to use that name. DeWar writes he needed better statistics in order to prepare the Admiralty's Weekly Appreciation of the U-boat war. According to his account, the Admiralty's Trade Division could tell him only the number and tonnage of ships sunk; the Customs Returns were the source for the tabulation of weekly arrivals and sailings. With the help of Norman Leslie of the Ministry of Shipping, it did not take long for the two officers to realize that the customs numbers grossly exaggerated the actual number of vessels that called on British ports. "These figures,"

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DeWar wrote later, "had been started as propaganda for the public. . ." For example, the report of 1,800 cross-Channel passages each month involved only about 200 vessels. When DeWar's next Weekly Appreciation showed that the weekly arrivals and departures of ocean-going ships amounted to only 200, DeWar was met with two reactions. First, there was disbelief; the First Lord - the Admiralty's political head - had become so accustomed to hearing the inflated Customs Returns, he thought DeWar must be using daily figures. The second response was bureaucratic. DeWar, according to his own account, had transgressed the rules of the Admiralty, when he had contacted another ministerial department without having sought and received proper clearance to do so.

Again, the story of Henderson's role is very similar. Henderson, according to Lloyd George's autobiography, discovered the "fateful error in accountantship which nearly lost us the War. . ." Henderson belonged to the "convoy lobby" of young officers within the Admiralty; the revealing statistics were, in a sense, his last best chance to undermine the organization's persistent refusal to consider the convoys as

either desirable or feasible. As already hinted at in DeWar's account, the Admiralty itself was not a likely place to give Henderson's numbers a warm welcome, especially their implication that convoying might be a practical proposition after all. Revealing the "real" numbers impugned the "High Admirals'" common sense; if the numbers further strengthened the case for convoying, then the admirals' strategic wisdom was in question. Knowing this, Henderson circumvented the formal chain

31

of command and contacted the political leadership directly. The indications are he chose Hankey, Lloyd George's éminence grise, as his point of contact. Hankey himself does not mention any meeting in his autobiography, but his biographer, Stephen Roskill, believes this to be almost certainly the case. There is a possibility also that, perhaps at Hankey's instigation, Henderson went to see Lloyd George directly. The prime minister's autobiography does not make specific mention of such a meeting, but the author makes it clear that he met with a number of junior officers who were critical of their superiors' ASW schemes and refusal to consider the convoy option seriously. Jellicoe and also his biographer, Admiral Bacon, mention Lloyd George's penchant to seek out the opinions of junior officers. Not surprisingly, neither man was pleased. "(T)here were apparently certain junior officers who went to, and were received by, Mr. Lloyd George, and who formulated to him ideas for dealing with the submarine menace," Jellicoe wrote. "Personally," he went on, "I had never heard of their proposals," and in any case, it was "strange that they did not ask to see me nor

some other officer in authority." Bacon was dismissive of "some junior officers and laymen" who, in his words, "egged on" the prime minister to force the immediate adoption of the convoy. Fortunately, Jellicoe "withstood Mr. Lloyd George's visionary ideas until America entered the war."

The admirals' unhappiness is undertand-able. The Junior officers had clearly violated the chain of command; their advocacy outside the Admiralty Board Room of a strategy that was clearly at odds with the Admiralty's agreed strategy, smacked of insubordination, if not outright sabotage. The officers' most grievous sin, though, was that by confiding in the country's political leadership, they had breached the navy's long and jealously-guarded immunity from civilian interference.

The Admirals Must Account

The Henderson/DeWar numbers ended Jellicoe's "honeymoon" with Lloyd George; the Admiralty's monopoly on decision-making was finis. It began on February 13, when the prime minister invited Carson, Jellicoe and his ASW chief, Admiral Duff, to 10 Downing Street. Hankey also attended. On the agenda was a memorandum prepared by Hankey, advocating the adoption of convoy- ing at the earliest possible date. Hankey has described his proposal as the result of "a brainwave on the subject of anti-submarine warfare" he had a few days earlier. His

biographer speculates that perhaps this "brainwave" was triggered by a meeting with Henderson. The navy's leadership was not yet ready to be convinced, however. Only one month ago, Jellicoe had told the War Cabinet that he wanted more decoy ships because they were "the most effective method of dealing with submarines." By contrast, merchant ships could not sail in formation, not enough destroyers were available for escorts, a convoy would have to sail at the speed of the slowest vessel, and a group of ships presented a much bigger and more vulnerable target than a vessel traveling alone. The admirals did agree to carefully monitor the results of ongoing trial convoys to France and Norway. Although he had achieved much less than he wanted, Lloyd George was not quite ready yet to bring matters to a head.

The reasons given why convoying was neither feasible nor desirable can be summarized as follows. To begin with, it was feared that ships sailing closely together and emitting a massive plume of smoke would increase, not decrease, the likelihood of their being spotted by a prowling U-boat. It was easy to visualize what would happen next: while the attacker picked off its targets at leisure, the surviving ships would panic, lose formation, and collide in their haste to flee the killing ground. Even if not under attack, there was much doubt among both naval and merchant marine officers whether a group of ships could sail a tightly controlled zigzag course; more ships might be lost as the result of collisions than the enemy. In his memoirs, Jellicoe acknowledges that this concern turned out to be "somewhat exaggerated"

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WWI Convoy Showing Spacing Between Ships, Escort in Foreground

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but that it was based, at the time, on his consultations with "many" merchant shipmasters. Jellicoe may have had any number of informal conversations, but the record reports only one official discussion. It took place on February 23, 1917. Ten ship masters were invited - nine attended. Jellicoe found that all nine much preferred to sail alone rather than in company. They "were quite emphatic" in their opinion, he wrote, that it would be impossible for eight ships, sailing in two columns and with speeds differing by, say, two knots, to keep station 2½ cables (about 500 yards) apart.

Jellicoe's suggested station-keeping criteria are interesting. They were evidently not based on any "field test," but borrowed instead from the Grand Fleet. When sailing in cruising formation, the Grand Fleet's battleships were typically organized into

divisions of four dreadnoughts each, stationed 2½ cables apart. The four-ship divisions, like Jellicoe's suggested convoy, sailed in columns, which themselves were eight cables, or 1,600 yards, apart. Keeping exact station could be difficult even for practiced navy crews. In the event of difficulties due to, say, weather or high speed, standing instructions called for ships to increase the distance between them. With this background in mind, the ship masters' negative reaction to Jellicoe's rather stringent convoy requirements is not very surprising. Perhaps more surprising is that Jellicoe apparently did not take a leaf from the Admiralty's own instructions and ask whether station-keeping would be feasible if spacing between ships was, say, doubled to five cables. Moreover, a skeptic could have pointed out that the key reason for the close spacing of the war fleet was not relevant for

a grouping of merchant vessels. Tight station keeping was necessary to minimize the time the battle fleet needed to make the evolution from cruising to battle formation. There was no such need for a merchant convoy. But then perhaps Jellicoe was not looking for an answer that might "prove" the convoy. Interestingly, when the convoy system was instituted, the typical spacing for ships sailing in column was 1,000 yards, and the spacing between columns as much as 2,000 yards.

The Admiralty's excessive - as it turned out - estimate of the number of escorts needed to protect a convoy may also have its roots Grand Fleet practice. Admiralty opinion at the time had it that the escorting forces would have to be twice as numerous as the vessels being escorted. As in the case of the station keeping issue, this was evidently an à priori opinion, which rested on neither practical experience with convoy screening, nor any form of careful analysis. Instead, the Grand Fleet's order of battle of capital ships and screening forces of light cruisers and destroyers seems to have been used as the 2:1 benchmark.

If the Grand Fleet "model" for escort requirements formed indeed the basis for the Admiralty's estimate of how many ships would be needed to protect convoys, the consequences were unfortunate. Not enough destroyers was constantly cited as a key reason why convoying, however desirable it might be on other grounds (which, in the eyes of most admirals, it was not) was not feasible. Evidently no one suggested that a destroyer screen for the battle fleet served an entirely different purpose than a convoy's - the first was there to attack the enemy's 34

battleships with torpedoes and defend their own battleships against enemy torpedo destroyers; the second was designed to protect.

When the convoys set sail in 1917, the continued shortage of escort forces compelled much "thinner" screens than were thought necessary. It turned out, though, that even a small number or relatively poorly armed vessels oftentimes sufficed to deter all but the most intrepid U-boat commanders. On paper, and depending on its size, a convoy was supposed to be accompanied by at least six destroyers; many had, however, only one escort on much of their route. Also, contrary to what seems common sense, there is no direct relationship between the number of ships in the convoy and the number of escorts. Larger convoys required more escorts, but a much more important factor than numbers of ships per se, is the size of the convoy's defensive perimeter. Adding ships expanded the perimeter, but only fractionally so. It has been learned in fact - though only after analysis many years after the war - that the larger the convoy the safer the ship.

Shipping interests feared that delays and port congestion - and therefore lowered earning power - would be one of convoy's unavoidable consequences. Delays would come in any number of ways: many vessels would have to make an intermediate voyage from their port of loading to a port of concentration; there, they would have to wait while the convoy was being collected; next, the faster ships would have to reduce their speed to that of the slowest in the convoy; and, finally, there would be more delays, when the ships arrived in their ports

of discharge where facilities were not designed to handle the "pulse arrivals" of large groups of ships. An added worry from the point of view of the authorities concerned the effect of the delays on the delivery rate of goods. They were all reasonable and, to a degree, justified arguments. From the perspective of the overall war effort though, they turned out manageable. Even Jellicoe, hardly an optimist, acknowledged that the feared "turn round" problem associated with the sudden arrival of large numbers of ships, was eventually "enormously decreased." The convoy system did adversely affect delivery rates. No detailed calculations for World War I are available, but the numbers for World War II are presumably representa- tive. It was found that, depending on theroute, delivery rates declined by 10 to 14 percent. This must be compared, however,with the cumulative effect on delivery rates of the much higher ship losses among "independents," which was far more serious, at least during World War II.

Many of the war-winning advantages of the convoy system would only became evident after it had been put into practice. Some would only be realized many years

afterward, when the raw statistics were finally taken in hand and evaluated with the help of the sophisticated tools of analysis that have collectively become known as "operational (or operations) analysis." But in April 1917, the time for prevarication and worry over the real and perceived risks of convoying was rapidly running out. The reality was that, even if convoying suffered from all the disadvantages the "High Admirals" claimed, it could produce no worse results than were being obtained by current methods. The problem was - at least according to Lloyd George - that the Admiralty could not admit to the possibility of a solution that fell outside its professional expertise:

They were like doctors who, whilst they are unable to arrest the ravages of a disease which gradually weakening the resistance of the patient despite all their efforts, are suddenly confronted with a new, unexpected and grave complication. They go about with gloomy mien and despondent hearts. Their reports are full of despair. It is clear that they think the case is now hopeless. All the same, their only advice is to persist in the application of the same treatment. Any other suggestion is vetoed. Their professional honour is involved in not accepting remedies which they have already refused to consider. What makes it difficult to persuade them to try an obvious cure is that it had been urged upon them by civilians and turned down by the experts with scorn and derision.

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again on April 23. The First Sea Lord gave

The day (April 10, 1917) that Sims made "the all-important discovery. . .that Britain did not control the seas" (emphasis in the original), losses at sea were relatively light. Three ships were torpedoed, but only two sank. At this point though, no one among Britain's political and military leadership questioned that the country was close to economic and military-strategic disaster. In a strong "minute sheet," dated March 29, Hankey urged "the most drastic measures," including "switch shipping from moving ammunition to bringing wheat from the United States and Canada." He effectively called for scaling back the war effort to prevent a national food crisis. The gravity of the food crisis became painfully evident in the War Cabinet's decision, two days afterward, to extend rationing to the trenches - the soldiers would have one potato-less day and fewer potatoes the other six days. The hemorrhage of Allied and neutral trading fleets meanwhile continued to outpace the completion of replacement shipping and the turnaround time for ships brought in for repair. Chances were that the one British ship that managed to escape destruction on the day of Sims's visit, had either been so damaged it had to be written

off or, if not, would not go back to sea for another five months. The fact is that for every five ships sunk worldwide, a sixth was either damaged beyond repair, or would take an average of four months to repair and another month to return to service. Thus, during the first half of 1917, 770,000 tons of shipping were damaged, about 50 percent of which could be considered as permanently lost. According to another report, the 50 percent that was repairable required an average repair time of four months per ship, and five months before the ship was back in service. In other words, if the Germans were correct in their calculation that it would take five to six months to bring Britain to its knees, then damaging a ship had about the same effect as sinking it!

The three weeks after the Jellicoe-Sims meeting proved to be decisive in setting in motion the strategic solution that ultimately defeated the U-boat. When he met with Sims, Jellicoe still gave the Admiralty's stock answer when it came to convoys - not enough destroyers, problems with station-keeping, etc. But in the undramatic words of World War One author of Seaborne Trade, Ernest Fayle, the "unprecedented losses suffered during the last fortnight of April, especially in the approach areas, greatly strengthened the hands of those who advocated the general introduction of the convoy system. . ." Lloyd George's hands were strengthened in particular when he found, while visiting the Grand Fleet on April 13, that its commander, Admiral Beatty, strongly supported convoying. He had also learned that Sims backed the idea. The war cabinet, including Jellicoe, met 36

War""We Run a Great Risk of Losing the

a bleak report on "The Submarine and Food Supply." Again, the Admiralty could offer no solutions other than to build up the country's food supply. He also proposed the construction of lots of small cargo ships which "would be more immune from attack," as well as a handful of very large, "unsinkable," vessels. Lloyd George reminded Jellicoe that both Beatty and Sims favored the convoy option. The message must have been clear: the convoy idea was no longer just the will-o'-the wisp idea of a handful of civilians and junior naval officers; it now had the backing of Britain's most senior fleet commander as well as the senior naval representative of Britain's new ally. Jellicoe agreed to "make a further report on the matter," but Lloyd George was evidently less than convinced that this would not be another stalling tactic. His assessment, as reported in his auto- biography, was that it "was clear that the Admiralty did not intend to take any effective steps in the direction of convoying." Two days later, on April 25, he received War Cabinet approval to visit the Admiralty on April 30 in order to, in his own words, "take peremptory action on the question of convoys."

Before tabling the matter before the War Cabinet, Lloyd George had informed the First Lord, Edward Carson, of his plan. Matters must have been rather hectic during the next few days. On April 26, the head of Admiralty's Anti-Submarine Division, Admiral Duff, gave Jellicoe a "minute," arguing that, thanks in part to the American entry into the war, the time had come to start up an ocean convoy system. Jellicoe approved it the next day, so that when the

Prime Minister made his entry into the Admiralty Board room on April 30, he found his task, in Hankey's words, "greatly simplified." The Admiralty set up a Convoy Committee to take charge of organizing the system and the first, experimental, convoys, one from Gibraltar, the other from Hampton Roads, set sail on May 10 and 24, respectively. By September, the system was in "full swing" for the Atlantic and Gibraltar trade. Notably excluded until mid-1918, ostensibly for a lack of escorts, was the Mediterranean.

Germany"

On October 13, 1918, with the armies of the Central Powers in collapse and final Allied victory around the corner, the Admiralty's First Lord told American newspaper reporters that it was the convoy system that had "baulked Germany when she adopted avowedly the inhuman and ruthless method of submarine warfare considered inconceivable and contrary to all the noble traditions of the sea before the war. . ." No one since has disagreed that the convoy system was the key to defeating the revolutionary changes in sea warfare wrought by the submarine. It was a success by any measure, the most important one being, of course, the minimization of losses of ships and cargoes.

The Admiralty knew what was coming.

In terms of sheer numbers, there never was a dearth of potential British and Allied escorts. The problem was that, even as the convoy system came into full bloom, most escort-capable ships were still committed to wasteful hunt-and-kill and "protected lane" patrol practices. According to one source, 37

"It Is the Convoy System Which Baulked

only 257 out of a fleet wide total of 5,018 Allied warships, or 5.1 percent, were committed to escort duties. It is tempting to speculate that the Admiralty seized on the prospect of American destroyers as a way to preserve their professional self-esteem and agree to a decision they knew at this point would be made with or without them.

Surprisingly perhaps - or so it seemed at first - escorts on convoy screens also turned out to be relatively more productive U-boat "killers" than their counterparts on dedicated seek-and-destroy patrols. To be sure, the convoy "antidote" did not become obvious until the spring of 1918. Until then, the U-boats continued to sink a monthly average of nearly 400,000 tons. Even this number underestimates the actual scale of continuing losses, for it does not include an average monthly loss of 40,000 tons due to irreparable damage and another 30,000 tons

due to marine casualties. Meanwhile, worldwide production of new shipping managed to compensate for only half the losses. The Admiralty, therefore, had good reason, in the summer of 1917, to present the War Cabinet with a rather gloomy prognosis. With a projected monthly loss rate of 650,000 tons and a national shipbuilding capacity that added only one-fifth of this number each month, the country was, in the words of an Admiralty memorandum, in a "very serious position." The submarine campaign would not likely force Britain to stop the war, but this could only be guaranteed, "if America puts forth her utmost effort." It was only starting in April 1918 that monthly losses consistently fell below 300,000 tons, and it was only in May that Lloyd George could confidently announce that, although the U-boat continued to be a threat, it was no longer a danger.

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Successful Trans-Atlantic Convoy, October 1918

The statistics of the convoy system's success are well known. Out of nearly 84,000 ships convoyed between February 1917 and October 1918, 257 were sunk for a loss rate of 0.30 percent. During the same period, 1,500 independents were lost for a loss rate of 5.93 percent. Put in another way, 85.5 percent of the losses suffered came from independents. On the "offensive" side of the ledger, escorts were responsible for sinking 24 out of the 40 U-boats sunk by surface vessels during the last 15 months of the war. Hunting patrols accounted for one, with the balance of 15 being the work of ships patrolling the so-called "protected lanes." Putting these two sets of figures together - ships lost vs. U-boats sunk - Marder has calculated an exchange rate of 19:1 for convoyed ships and 140:1 for independents. In the first case, escorts were the responsible "killers;" in the second hunting forces and standing patrols. Marder is fully justified in claiming that these figures fully dispel any question about the comparative effectiveness of convoy.

It appears that the reason for the convoy's success is far less to be found in the defensive capacity of its screen of escorts (which, it must be remembered, still did not have the ability to detect an underwater enemy) than its ability to disappear. Depending on its size, a convoy might occupy an area from four to ten square miles, seemingly, in Admiral Sims' words, "about as desirable a target as the submarine could have desired." In truth, and contrary to expectations, ten square miles somewhere among the millions of square miles of the ocean, amount to a very small target. Put differently, the probability of a submarine

spotted.

encountering at least one out of, say, 40

ships sailing independently, is much higher than its chance of falling upon a 40-ship convoy. Admiral Sims wrote that, also contrary to the popular perception, the convoy and its destroyer screen were an offensive system, which compelled the U-boats to fight for every ship they meant to attack. The U-boats operated singly (experimental operations with coordinated pairs were begun in late 1917), which meant that, if a convoy was sighted, a boat rarely had a chance to complete more than one attack. This explains why, out of the hundreds of convoys, involving some 95,000 vessels, which were attacked by U-boats, only 393 ships were sunk.

If the convoy system reversed the offense-defense balance by forcing the U-boat hunter to put itself in harm's way, it also served to overturn the balance between hide-and-seek. Namely, by "emptying" the seas of hundreds of defenseless merchantmen scattered everywhere, the convoy organizers had shifted the burden of finding the enemy away from the ASW defender and to the submarine attacker. Karl Dönitz, who would lead the U-boats' second Battle of the Atlantic in World War II but was a youngU-boat commander in 1918, noted that the "oceans at once became bare and empty." Empirical support for this observation lies in that fact, for example, that of the 219 convoys that crossed the Atlantic between October and December 1917, only 39 were

Thanks to its excellent radio intercept organization the Admiralty ensured that the oceans were even emptier than they would have been "naturally." Convoying, unlikeU-boat hunting, lent itself admirably to the 39

work of the U-boat tracking section, which had been set up in "Room 40," the Admiralty's intelligence division in the spring of 1917. As has already been noted, throughout the war, the Admiralty had quite reliable intelligence about the general whereabouts and comings and goings of the U-boats. The problem was that the information was rarely accurate and current enough for it to be useful at the tactical level of submarine hunting. But it was perfectly adequate to alert an incoming convoy and divert it away from an area of suspected submarine concentration. It had been impossible to warn shipping while it sailed independently, not only because no one ashore could know from one day to the next where every vessel was, but also because many older ships still had no wireless. The convoy system, on the other hand, gave naval planners the means to fuse

been very significant. Sims was more certain that evasive routing was the key to the convoy's success. In his memoir, The Victory at Sea, he goes so far as to point out, "the interesting fact that, even had there been no destroyer escort, the convoy itself would have formed a great protection to merchant shipping." Elsewhere he is quoted that "history will show, when all the facts are known, that more shipping was saved through keeping track of submarines and routing ships clear of them than by any other single measure." It is curious that this peculiar benefit had not been anticipated. After all, one of the biggest handicaps of fleet commanders in the past had always been the difficulty of finding the enemy fleet, especially when it did not want to be found!

There is a minor debate of sorts still on what exactly made the convoy so successful. Was it the ring of defensive escorts, which, even if it did not "kill" U-boats, had a deterrent effect or at least made attacks more difficult, or was it evasive routine? Beesly admits it is impossible to calculate how many ships were saved due to re-routing but believes the numbers to have

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1917 German Magazine CoverReflecting National Confidence in the U-boat Fleet

U-boat intelligence with complete "situational awareness" about the location of friendly shipping. As a result, wrote a post-war Admiralty monograph, "for the first time one could see the latest information as to enemy submarines side by side with the track of a convoy, and as the (convoy) Commodore's ship was always equipped with wireless, it was possible at once to divert a convoy from a dangerous area."

skeptics, agreed it did. Yet, for many officers, this was not enough. They simply did not like it.

WWI Convoy ManualUsed Again in WWII, Declassified 1972

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Convoyers

In his account of World War I, Churchill labeled the convoy decision "the decisive step" that defeated the U-boats. He even cites the escorts' successful "offensive actions." Yet, a world war later, when convoying again proved the salvation of Allied shipping, he confided how, "I always sought to rupture this defensive obsession by searching for forms of counteroffensive. . .I could not rest content with the policy of 'convoy and blockade.'" Together, the two pronouncements fairly sum up the continuing ambivalence among many senior naval officers on the subject of the convoy. By any logical and empirical measure, convoying had clearly shown to be the most, perhaps only, effective means of defeating the submarine's tonnage-sinking capacity. It worked, and everyone, even

Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914-1918. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich Publishers, 1982

Vice-Admiral K.G.B. DeWar, The Navy from Within. London: Victor Gollancz, 1939

Ernest Fayle, History of the Great War: Seaborne Trade, Vol. II. New York: Longman, Green & Co., 1923

Robert M. Grant, U-Boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-Submarine Warfare 1914-1918. London: Putnam, 1964

Sir Norman Leslie, “The Convoy System in 1917-18: Convoy and Transportation During the War.” Earl Brassey and John Leyland, Eds., The Naval Review 1919. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1919

Dwight R. Messimer, Find and Destroy: Antisubmarine Warfare in World War I. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001.

Stephen Roskill, Hankey – Man of Secrets, Vol. I 1877-1918. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1970

Eberhard Rössler, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1981

Eberhard Rössler, U-Boot Alarm: Zur Geschichte der U-Boot-Abwehr (1914-1945). Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagshaus, 1998

Michael Simpson, Ed., Anglo-American Naval Relations 1917-1919. Aldershot: Gower Publishing for the Navy Records Society, 1991

Postscript: The Reluctant

(Memoirs of the principals, including Lloyd George, Churchill, Jellicoe and Sims, and official histories and documents have been deleted in the sake of brevity.)

Some Sources Consulted for: Defeating the U-boat: Inventing Anti-Submarine Warfare

Starting with this issue we will present a World War I trivia challenge for our readers. This issue the topic is:

Name the poet and the title of the work in which this memorable line appears:

Answers on Page 46.

1. There's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England

2. The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard among the guns below.

3. Here dead we lie because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung

4. A Garden called Gesthemane, in Picardy it was

5. And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.

6. Where tongues were loud and hearts were light I heard the Ancre flow.

7. If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base

8. The young men of the world Are condemned to death. They have been called up to die For the crime of their fathers.

9. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

10. Gas! Gas! boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmet just in time;

11. What then was war? No mere discord of flags But an infection of the common sky

12. Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance.

Bonus Challenge:Match the Poet With

His Selection on the Left

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The Great War SocietyTrivia Challenge

Recognizing Your War Poets

A Book Review From Len Shurtleff

This is a survey history of the vast Eastern Front, extending for nearly 1200 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea across the Polish plains through the Pripet Marshes, the oil fields of Silesia, the Carpathian Mountains and the Iron Gates of the Danube and the Rumanian Dobrudja. Nearly all the combatants on both sides were represented here: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Even the British and French had limited land and naval forces engaged by the end of the war.

Huge armies grappled in the east. The Germans alone had as many as two million men engaged at the height of the fighting, suffering over a million casualties over four years. Austria-Hungary had over 44 divisions, half her army, deployed against Russia, which, in turn, deployed nearly half of her 294 divisions against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Casualty figures for Russia are unreliable but go as high as ten million military and civilian dead. Civilian losses, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of refugees (many of them Poles, Lithuanians or Ukrainians) displaced in the deep Russian retreat of 1915, are impossible to determine.

The author starts his survey with a review of the strategic position of the protagonists in 1914, moving through the overwhelming German 1914 victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the 1915 battles in Galicia and the Carpathians, the Brusilov Offensive and the defeat of Rumania in 1916, the disintegration of the Czarist army and government in 1917, to the post-1918 battles between the Red Army and the newly independent Polish state, the Rumanian invasion of Hungary and the actions of German Frei Korps, in the Silesian Plebiscite War of 1921. Also covered in useful detail are command rivalries within the Imperial German and Russian Armies and between the German and Austro-Hungarian commands, as well as the various treaties (Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest) ending the conflict.

In all, this is a valuable addition to the slim library of WWI Eastern Front histories* and well worth reading. Weaknesses include the maps (which though plentiful and detailed are monochromatic and hard to decipher) and exclusive reliance on secondary sources. Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front in the First World War, G. Irving Root, Publish America, 2007, 387 pages, bibliography, maps, ISBN 1 4241 6800 7, $24.95 paperback. Visit Ambassador Len Shurtleff's "WWI Bookshelf" at www.wfa-usa.org/new/books.htm

For those interested in further reading:The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, Norman Stone, Simon & Schuster, 1975

Handcuffed to a Corpse: German Intervention in the Balkans and on the Galician Front, 1914-1917, Michael P. Kihntoph, White Mane, 2002

Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front in theFirst World War, by G. Irving Root

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Reviews from the Online Newsletter

St. Mihiel Trip-Wire

Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière

Leutnant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière. How did an Imperial German Naval commander have a French name? I've read two different accounts as to his name's origin. The first is that he was the son of a French officer captured in the Franco-Prussian War who decided to stay in Germany. The second version I've read traces the family back to an 18th-century soldier of fortune great-grandfather who after a disagreement with the Duke of Bourbon offered his sword to Frederick the Great. The following generations would serve either in the Army or the Navy.

In 1903, when he was 17, Von Arnauld joined the German Navy. Before the war he served as torpedo officer aboard the cruiser Emden. Then he became aide-de-camp to Grand Admiral von Tirpitz and was serving on the Admiralty Staff when the war started. First, von Arnauld tried for a zeppelin command. But with no zeppelin commands available he eventually found himself taking command of U-35. From January 1916 to March 1918 he racked up a formidable record, sinking 194 ships totaling over 453,000 tons. Under his command, the U-35 fired only four torpedoes, one of which missed the target. Von Arnauld's weapon of choice was his 88mm deck gun. He was awarded the "Blue Max," the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest award and asked for and got an autographed photograph from the Kaiser. Later the Kaiser sent him a handwritten personal letter of commendation.

The German High Command realized they had a "star performer" in the Navy, and just as they had assigned a film crew to von Richthofen's squadron, they assigned a film crew of one to be the official cameraman on the March/May 1917 patrol of the U-35 in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.

After slipping past Gibraltar, the U-35 began its hunt. In an interview after the war with Lowell Thomas for Raiders of the Deep (1928), von Arnauld described how the cameraman operated: "It was on this voyage that we had a movie man along. Poor devil! His face still haunts me. Pea green it was most of the time. You see, he had never before gone to sea on a submarine, and he was a sufferer from mal de mer in its most virulent form. Usually he stuck to his camera crank as a real film hero should. Shells and bullets and oncoming torpedoes could not drive him from it. But sea sickness did. There were times when he longed for a shell to come along with his name written on it, to end it all. Then, when Neptune waved his wand and stilled the rolling deep, that cinema man was a hero once more. If we got into a rough-and-tumble gunfight with an armed ship he would take his own sweet time and would coolly refocus his magic box and switch lenses as though it were a hocus-pocus battle on location instead of grim reality." This patrol saw the U-35 sinking 23 ships, totaling 68,000 tons.

A Film Review by Andrew Melomet

The Log of the U-35The top-scoring U-boat ace of both world wars was Kapitän

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reference to a statement by Churchill. The footage shot has been used and reused in numerous documentaries on submarine warfare and the naval war of World War One.

Eventually the British captured a copy and released their own version for propaganda purposes with new English intertitles under the title "The Exploits of a German Submarine (U35) Operating in the Mediterranean". This version and the original German release are currently available on VHS (PAL and NTSC) restored by the Imperial War Museum.

U-35 in Harbor

And, later, the Americans got hold of copies, as well. Rowland V. Lee, a former actor at the Thomas Ince studio and later a director (Son of Frankenstein, etc.) served in the front lines and fought in the Battle of St. Mihiel. He worked on the "Smiles Films," professionally-shot movies of families at home shown to the troops in Europe. Lee saw a captured print of Der Magische Gurtel at Coblenz, American Occupation Headquarters. He wanted to get hold of the film and ship it back to the States as a historical record. After the projectionist left, Lee piled up the film cans in a corner and hid them under some newspapers. When he returned later the cans were gone. J.H. Mackzum, a German-born Knights of Columbus secretary found the hidden cache and got them off to Hearst News, which featured them in the newsreel Hearst News No. 64.

The New York Times reviewed this footage on November 11, 1919, stating that "these pictures were made by officers on German submarines and were obtained from the present German Government by J.H. Mackzum, a Knights of Columbus secretary, who brought them to America." On January 5, 1920 the New York Times printed another review possibly based on the British release. "The most unusual and most powerful picture on the program is one entitled, 'The Log of the U-35,' which, like a similar film brought here by J.H. Mackzum, a Knights of Columbus secretary, and shown at the Rialto seven weeks ago, is said to have been made on a German submarine during the war and to have been obtained by allied

The film was released in Germany as Der Magische Gürtel (The Enchanted Circle). The title was a

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representatives since the armistice. It shows cargo steamers and a picturesque schooner stopped by the submarine, wounded by its shells and bombs, and then sinking, each one slowly at first, with a different turn or roll of dumb helplessness before finally disappearing with a hurried plunge into its grave. For those to whom ships are something human, or magnificently triumphant human creations, these pictures of their assassination by forces controlled by men are overwhelmingly tragic--or, to the mood of despair, hellishly comic."

World War I Films of the Silent Era, released by Image Entertainment, includes a version of The Log of the U-35 that is a combination of the 1919 British version and the 1920 American versions of Der

Game (1917) directed by William C. de Mille and starring Sessue Hayakawa, Florence Vidor, Jack Holt and Charles Ogle. The Moving Picture Boys in the Great War (1975) narrated by Lowell Thomas is included as a "Bonus Documentary." I highly recommend this collection.

U-35 in the Mediterranean

And what happened to the U-35 and von Arnauld? The U-35 was transferred to England after the war and was docked in Blyth from 1919 to 1920 before being broken up. Von Arnauld went on to command the third cruiser named Emden from September 1928 to October 1930. He taught at the Turkish Naval Academy from 1932 to 1938. Von Arnauld served in the Kriegsmarine as a vice-admiral and held commands in occupied Europe before dying in a plane crash in France in February 1941.

Andrew Melomet, Proprietor of Andy's Nickelodeon, contributes monthly reviews at the

the Web but is popular with members of all the military history groups.

Magische Gürtel. This collection also includes the documentary Fighting the War (1916), The Secret

Trivia Answers: 1. Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier" Image A 2. John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" 3. A.E. Housman, "Here Dead We Lie" 4. Rudyard Kipling, "Gesthemane (1914-1918)" 5. Alan Seeger, "Rendezvous" Image D 6. Edmund Blunden, "The Ancre at Hamel" 7. Siegfried Sassoon," Base Details" 8. F.S. Flint, "Lament" 9. Isaac Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches" Image C 10. Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" Image B 11. Robert Graves, "Recalling War" 12. Edward Thomas, "Roads"

Trip-Wire (http://www.worldwar1.com/tripwire/smtw.htm). The Trip-Wire is affiliated with Trenches on

There are numerous sites to visit in the Meuse-Argonne sector. This map from American Armies and Battlefields in Europe has been highlighted to show some of the most important and impressive.

A. New Henry Gunther Memorial near Chaumont-devant- DamillersB. New Lost Battalion Monument at BinarvilleC. New Sgt. York Historic Trail near Châtel-ChéhéryD. Pennsylvania Memorial at Varennes (Off-Map)E. Butte de Vacquois, Jump-Off Point of 35th Division (Off Map)F. Montfaucon: Early Objective & Site of U.S. Monument

G. Romagne: Region of Strong German Defenses in Mid- Period & Site of U.S. CemeteryH. Barricourt Heights: Major Obstacle in November 1 AssaultI. Dun-sur-Meuse: Site of Major River Crossing on November 5; Frank Luke Memorial East of TownJ. Heights of la Marée Dominating SedanK. Site of River Crossing of November 10-11, Last Major Attack of World War I

90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne: Map and Key Locations

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My fellow countrymen, The armistice

was signed this morning. Everything

for which America fought has been

accomplished. It will now be

our fortunate duty to assist by

example by sober friendly counsel and by

material aid in the establishment

of just democracy throughout

the world.

Woodrow Wilson

90 Years AgoPresident Wilson Announces the Armistice

Manuscript Division, Library of CongressGift of Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, 1930

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