The Submarine Service, 19001918

This collection of documents is drawn from a wide range of sources including Admiralty and Cabinet Papers at the former Public Record Office, now the National Archives, additional manuscripts at the British Library and Admiralty Constructors Department records at the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, together with the private papers of, among others, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, and Admirals of the Fleet Lord Fisher and Lord Keyes. Taken together they dispel two key myths about the Royal Navy’s attitude to and adoption of submarines in the years before the First World War. The first is that the Admiralty was a technologically conservative institution that hated the idea of the submarine. The documents clearly show that this was not the case and even those officers who did oppose submarine development did so from what was then a rational perspective. Moreover there is evidence that monitoring developments in submarine technology went back as far as the American Civil War while the Admiralty secretly placed its first contract for submarine construction with Vickers before the end of 1900 while continuing overtly ‘to do nothing to justify or encourage’ rival powers from sponsoring submarine development. The second myth undermined by the documents is that pre-war policy-makers failed to anticipate the effectiveness of the submarine as a commerce destroyer. In fact, British naval policymakers had not only conceived but even adopted a new strategic policy before 1914 that reflected their belief that the submarine would play a central role in future wars. Lord Fisher, in a paper presented to Churchill in December 1913, had argued that the submarine had supplanted the battleship as the decisive naval weapon and that submarines would be compelled to sink their prey without warning, a prediction fulfilled when Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against commercial vessels as well as warships. In the early years of the century the Royal Navy had developed a sea denial or ‘flotilla defence’ strategy based on the use of ‘patrol’ submarines. However, a change of direction in 1910 led to the development of the ‘fleet submarine’, a vessel with high surface speed capable of working with the battle fleet. Although this had significant negative consequences, it still reflected the Navy’s confidence in the submarine as a weapon of war. Fortunately the aberration was short-lived and by 1913 the Admiralty had returned to the original sea-denial strategy and subsequently made every effort to make up for lost ground. By the end of 1914 significant orders for patrol submarines were being placed in both British and American ship yards. The wisdom of the decision was underlined when, in the closing weeks of 1914, HMS/m B11 penetrated the minefields guarding the Dardanelles and torpedoed the 10,000 ton Turkish battleship Messudiah. During the remainder of the war, it was the personnel of the Royal Navy Submarine Service who manned the front line in the war at sea.