Lawrence Sondhaus - German Submarine Warfare in World War I: The Onset of Total War at Sea

German Submarine Warfare in World War I

German Submarine Warfare in World War I

The Onset of Total War at Sea

Lawrence Sondhaus

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Copyright 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sondhaus, Lawrence, 1958 author.

Title: German submarine warfare in World War I : the onset of total war at sea / Lawrence Sondhaus.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Series: Total war | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017011988 (print) | LCCN 2017013908 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442269552 (electronic) | ISBN 9781442269545 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 19141918Naval operationsSubmarine. | World War, 19141918Naval operations, German.

Classification: LCC D591 (ebook) | LCC D591 .S66 2017 (print) | DDC 940.4/512dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011988

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

Germanys campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I marked the onset of total war at sea. The German people readily embraced the argument that an undersea blockade of Britain enforced by their navys Unterseeboote (U-boats) was the moral equivalent of the British navys more conventional blockade of German ports, but international opinion never accepted its legitimacy, even though the campaign began as an ad hoc response to Britains plan to achieve victory by strangling Germany economically. During the war the Allies also torpedoed unarmed ships, just as they also used poison gas on the battlefield and dropped bombs on cities from the air, but the Germans ultimately bore the stigma of having done each of these things first. In their initial, somewhat confused rollout of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, German leaders underestimated the extent to which the policy would alienate the most important neutral power, the United States. In rationalizing the risk of resuming the unrestricted campaign in February 1917, they took for granted that, should the United States join the Allies, their U-boats would be able to stop the transport of an American army to France. But by bringing the United States into the war while also failing to stop the deployment of its troops to Europe, unrestricted submarine warfare caused Germany to lose the war. Because American manpower proved decisive in breaking the stalemate on the western front and securing victory for the Allies, Germanys decision to stake its fate on the U-boat campaign ranks among the greatest blunders of modern history.

The unrestricted German campaign of World War I was revolutionary in that it applied a relatively new weapon to an age-old strategy. In the wars first weeks, dramatic successes of submarines against surface warships raised the possibility that they would be even more lethally effective if deployed as commerce raiders against unarmed targets. Following the initial false start of 1915, plagued by insufficient resources and insufficient resolve, German submarine warfare entered a restricted phase, an interlude during which traditional cruiser rules were followed (albeit sometimes loosely) in a campaign focusing on the Mediterranean. After the German surface fleets tactical victory at Jutland in 1916 failed to alter the strategic reality of the war at sea, navy leaders prepared for the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg announced early the following year, characterizing it as Germanys best and sharpest weapon. But the improvement of Allied countermeasures, most notably the development of a comprehensive convoy system after the United States entered the war, caused the unrestricted campaign to fall short of sinking enough tonnage to force the Allies to sue for peace. Even though the U-boats failed to deliver on their promisea failure that contributed to a decline of morale on the home front as well as within the navythe campaign continued through anxious months of diminishing returns until just three weeks before Germanys final defeat, when it was abandoned in a belated attempt to appease the United States and secure armistice terms based on Woodrow Wilsons Fourteen Points. The Versailles Treaty prohibited Germany from having submarines and thus made the revival of the undersea service a matter of principle for Adolf Hitler after the establishment of the Third Reich. The ultimate failure of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I did not deter Germany from trying it again in World War II, when the United States likewise waged a ruthless unrestricted undersea campaign against Japan.

This book leans heavily on the memoirs of Germanys naval and political leaders as well as its U-boat commanders, a remarkable number of whom survived the war to publish their recollections. Their accounts have been cross-checked against resources available in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, most notably convoy reports and the interrogation files of captured German submariners, as well as statistical studies produced in the decades-long quest by historians and history buffs to account for every German submarine that sortied in either world war. The latter effort has culminated in recent years in the work of information technology specialist Gumundur Helgason of Reykjavik, Iceland, whose database has become an invaluable resource for scholars. Above all, this book is supported by a synthesis of the best scholarship on the subject, benefiting from my insights into the German perspective and German decision making, which throughout the war served as the primary driver for the action at sea as well as on land. My prior experience in researching and writing on German and Austrian naval and military topics, most of which have been from the era of World War I, naturally informs my explanations of the factors shaping the strategies and operations of the Central Powers. It has led me to the broader conclusion that in the naval war, no less than in the trenches, World War I may be conceptualized as a series of Allied reactions to the actions of the Central Powers; thus, understanding their actions is key to understanding the war as a whole.