When the war started, Britain clearly dominated the sea. The first all-big-gun battleship, the British Dreadnought, had been launched in 1906, supplemented by another 23 built by mid-1914, including three funded with generous contribu- tions from Canada. Before the war, Germany attempted to catch up in the strate- gic arms race, building about 16 dreadnought-type battleships before the guns of August signaled the beginning of the war. Even with the British naval superiority, however, Britain had cause to be concerned about the naval balance of power.
Despite the numerical advantage of the Grand Fleet over Germany’s High Seas Fleet, the British clearly had more responsibilities than did the German navy. Although Germany could launch ground assaults on the continent with- out a navy, Britain relied on the Grand Fleet to protect its merchant shipping. Two-thirds of the food supply for Britain came by sea, and the British merchant fleet carried more than half of the world’s total maritime commerce. In addi- tion, the Grand Fleet had to make sure the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) sailed under escort safely to Europe, and it had to protect the food supply to the British Isles and guard against any invasion or bombardment of its coastal ports. Furthermore, as passenger ships transported troops from India and the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand through the Suez Canal to Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Europe, they had to be protected. In addition to these duties, the fleet had to mount a blockade of German ports and, if possible, bottle up the German fleet.
Although the dreadnought with its heavy guns represented a new type of ship, the logic of its employment became clear from the beginning. It could be used in attacks on enemy warships and could serve to bombard shore facili- ties, to escort other ships, or could be pressed into blockade duty. However, the submarine represented a revolution in military affairs that, like the aircraft, took
warfare off the surface of the planet. Yet naval officers did not know exactly how it would be employed in 1914.
The submarine, however, demonstrated its potential for changing the nature of war at sea when the German U-boat U-9 under Lieutenant Otto Weddigen attacked three British cruisers off the Dutch coast. One reason for the loss of all three ships derived from adherence to a fine heritage. Following tradition, when
Aboukir went down, the other two cruisers closed in to rescue sailors from the
sea, exposing themselves to further attack. Weddigen, in his eyewitness account of the episode, recognized that he confronted a unique targeting opportunity that would probably not recur. In later engagements, only ships capable of attacking submarines, such as destroyers, would come to the rescue of sailors, while the heavier capital ships such as cruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts fled to safer waters. British and Germans alike learned the lessons of Aboukir, Hogue, and
Cressy, paid for at such a tragic cost.
Another German submarine, U-24, sank the British battleship Formidable on December 31, 1914, with the loss of 547 officers and men. The early success of the U-9 in sinking three British warships and then the loss of Formidable added to Jellicoe’s concerns, leading him to station both his reserve fleet and the ships to blockade Germany at great distances from the German ports, relying on mine- fields in the North Sea and the Channel to restrict the movements of commercial ships. Dreadnoughts, battleships, and even fast cruisers could no longer be risked to submarine attack and needed to be protected by destroyers, torpedo boats, and other small craft while at sea or protected in harbor by strong defenses. Within months, the British Admiralty applied the lessons in the wake of the loss of heavy warships to the small submarines.
Questions remained. Could the submarine be used to raid against civilian merchant ships? According to traditional practice, when a warship seized a mer- chant ship at sea in the course of a blockade, the naval vessel would confiscate the freighter and would make every effort to save the noncombatant sailors and even work to repatriate them to their home nation. Usually submarines did not carry enough men to put prize crews aboard the merchant ships they stopped at sea, and, in the cramped quarters of a submarine, there would be little room for guests, although many submarine captains did take prisoners aboard rather than let them drown. So if a submarine destroyed a merchant ship at sea, the question of humane treatment of the civilian crew and passengers presented a problem. The traditions of the sea and the conditions of the submarine did not make a good match, and submarine captains found them especially difficult to reconcile. Nevertheless, many German U-boat officers developed reputations for extreme care for the crews of the ships they sank. Some would wait nearby until rescue vessels approached the lifeboats, and, in some cases, the U-boats would tow life- boats to within sight of land.
As submarine policy changed in Germany several times, the final decision on humane practices varied, frequently depending on the values and character of individual submarine captains. Some, like Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, proved consistently gracious and helpful to the crews and passengers of ships they attacked, warning them before sinking their vessel and making provisions for their safety. Arnauld only rarely used his torpedoes, but, instead, after warning a ship and evacu- ating its crew and any passengers to seaworthy lifeboats, he would sink the ship with delayed charges placed aboard or with shells from his deck gun. The British
listed other more ruthless captains as war criminals, like Wilhelm Werner of U-55, who more than once torpedoed clearly marked hospital ships in defiance of official German policy and the rules of war. The British press played up such atrocities with great fanfare and several such incidents inflamed American opinion. Yet only a very few German submarine captains were charged with such war crimes by the Brit- ish, and the vast majority of them did their best to act within the spirit and even the letter of the international cruiser rules even though their submarines could be rammed by ordinary freighters or shot and sunk by armed merchant ships. Some of the most crucial episodes that angered American public opinion and which prompted American diplomatic responses remained surrounded by ambiguity. In some cases, U-boat captains claimed that the merchant ships that they torpedoed appeared as if making threatening runs to ram them; in other cases, a merchant ship may have been mistaken for a warship. Newspapers sometimes reported an attack on the front pages as if the merchant ship had been given no warning and many of the crew had been killed, only to give a fuller report in a much smaller story on interior pages a few days later when lifeboats full of survivors began to be picked up or reach land. Even so, U-boats made attacks without warning on defenseless civilian merchant ships frequently enough through the period 1914–17 to give plenty of cause for distress in the United States and Britain.
Not until Germany launched into an official policy of unrestricted subma- rine warfare in 1917 did the practice of sinking without warning become com- monplace, however. In 1915, German submarines gave no warning to only 21 percent of ships attacked; in 1916, the number sunk without warning climbed to 29 percent.
The British confronted the question of how they might maintain a blockade against Germany in the face of land-based aircraft for spotting the blockading ships and the possibility of torpedo-equipped submarines that could dart out from port to destroy the blockaders. For the Germans, it seemed unwise to risk their smaller surface fleet in a major engagement with the British Grand Fleet, yet, if most of the German fleet could not break out to sea, its effectiveness would be nullified.
Naval strategists had entered the war believing that the surface ship and the great fleet engagements could determine the outcome of the war. But the course of the war nearly erased that illusion, with the consequences of the use of sub- marines and aircraft at least partially demonstrated.
These maritime issues would come to the fore in 1915, all of them requir- ing new solutions because of the changes in the technology of war at sea. Before the submarine emerged as the weapon that might decide the war, three battles of the surface fleets tested the British and German navies in the seas between Britain and the western coast of Europe: Heligoland Bight, Dogger Bank, and Jutland, while far off in the Pacific, Indian, and South Atlantic oceans, a few Ger- man surface raiders, sailing independently or in small squadrons of a few ships, demonstrated that the war had indeed spread across the whole planet, becoming truly a worldwide war.