Castles of Steel (144 page)

“My father,” explained Richard Lloyd George, “once under the spell of the exercise of his own charm, whether it concerned an audience at a public meeting or consisted of one person, became completely carried away, without any other idea in his head, without a thought of consequences. . . . My father was probably the greatest natural Don Juan in the history of British politics. . . . His entire life, including fifty-three years of marriage to my mother, was involved with a series of affairs with women. . . . My father’s chief safeguard in these affairs was that he was almost never seriously involved emotionally. . . . He had no sense of loyalty to his mistresses, and could present a bold, indignant front, with flat protestations that he was being ‘victimised by these vainglorious harpies who wanted to boast of their conquest of me.’. . . There was almost never any continuing association, so that at any particular time he could declare without fear of contradiction, ‘Hardly know the woman. Haven’t seen her for months and not the least intention of seeing her again.’

“To portray his life without taking into account this side of his personality,” the son concludes, “is like failing to depict Beethoven’s handicap of deafness during the composition of his greatest works.”]

On May 10, sixteen merchant vessels, sailing in three columns and escorted by two armed merchantmen and three armed yachts, departed Gibraltar for England, traveling at 6½ knots. Eight days later, the convoy was met at the outer edge of the submarine danger zone by six destroyers from Devonport, and on May 20 the sixteen merchantmen reached Plymouth unharmed. No U-boats had been encountered and, equally important, the merchant captains had found that they could keep station, obey signals, and zigzag in unison, and furthermore that they “had enjoyed more sleep than they had had for months.” This success led to another experimental convoy, this time across the North Atlantic. On May 24, twelve merchant ships left Hampton Roads for Britain, traveling at 9 knots. They were escorted most of the way by the cruiser
Roxburgh
and, on reaching the danger zone, were met by eight destroyers. Two slow steamers straggled and dropped out; one of these was torpedoed. The remaining ships arrived safely on June 7. Despite fog and heavy weather, the navy reported that their station keeping had been excellent.

The success of these two trial convoys encouraged the Admiralty to expand the effort. In June, sixty-four merchant vessels, gathered in four convoys, were escorted from Hampton Roads to Britain. Assembling safely and receiving instructions inside American harbors rather than in the open sea, North Atlantic convoys began running every fourth day. By the end of July, twenty-one convoys made up of 354 ships had crossed the Atlantic; of the convoyed ships, submarines sank two. This plunge in shipping losses demolished the “too many eggs in one basket” objection to convoy. In the first place, the presence of convoy escorts eliminated the threat of attack by gunfire and forced U-boats to use torpedoes. And to make an underwater attack now became more difficult: the submarine commander had to come within range—the ideal was about 700 yards—while somehow eluding the escorts. Against ships sailing independently, the U-boat had generally been able to maneuver into position, fire a torpedo, watch his victim sink, and then lookaround for his next target. With a convoy, the whole mass of ships swept by together and was gone. Essentially, as Sims graphically described it, convoy was managing to “establish a square mile of the surface of the ocean in which submarines could not operate and then move that square along until port was reached.”

Often, the U-boats never saw the convoy or its escorts. “The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance,” Winston Churchill later wrote. “There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one.” This phenomenon was also noted by Karl Doenitz, a U-boat commander who became the commander of German submarines, the Commander-in-Chief of the German navy, and the last führer of the Third Reich in World War II. Of the effect of convoy in the Great War, he wrote:

The oceans at once became bare and empty. For long periods at a time, the U-boats, operating individually, would see nothing at all; and then suddenly up would loom a huge concourse of ships, thirty or fifty or more of them, surrounded by a strong escort of warships of all types. The solitary U-boat, which most probably had sighted the convoy purely by chance, would then attack, thrusting again and again . . . for perhaps several days and nights until the physical exhaustion of the commander and crew called a halt. The lone U-boat might well sink one or two ships, or even several, but that was a poor percentage of the whole. The convoy would steam on. In most cases, no other German U-boat would catch sight of it and it would reach Britain, bringing a rich cargo of foodstuffs and raw materials safely to port.

The success of convoy forced naval officers fighting submarines to shift their thinking. Trained in the Royal Navy’s tradition of offensive warfare, they had previously considered convoy to be a defensive tactic in which warships handed the initiative to the enemy and then plodded along beside merchant ships awaiting attack. Most officers preferred aggressive hunting for submarines. Reality turned these tactics upside down. Convoy, it turned out, concentrated surface naval forces where the submerged enemy was bound to come if he wished to do harm. The inviting presence of so many targets drew U-boats to a place where the antisubmarine craft could get at them and kill them. To make convoy work, however, there had to be sufficient escort ships. Where would Britain find them?

On Friday, May 4, 1917, six modern, four-stacker U.S. Navy destroyers entered the Irish harbor of Queenstown. The morning was brilliant, with the sun sparkling on smooth water and shining on the green hills rising behind the town. Ships in the harbor welcomed the newcomers by flying the American flag from a forest of masts. In the town, the Stars and Stripes floated from public buildings and private houses. Along the shore, thousands of people cheered and waved. Watching the American warships come in, British seamen noticed that they were longer and larger than British destroyers, qualities that would give them greater endurance and radius of action on the Western Approaches. The American commander was Joseph K. Taussig, who in 1900, as a twenty-one-year-old midshipman, had been wounded near Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion campaign. Recovering, Taussig found himself lying on a cot next to a forty-year-old Royal Navy captain named John Jellicoe who had been more severely wounded the same day. Seventeen years later, when Taussig came ashore in Queenstown, the First Sea Lord welcomed him in the name of “the British nation and the British Admiralty and [with] every possible good wish from myself. We shall all have our work cut out to subdue piracy.”

Taussig was also welcomed by Vice Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly, the British Commander-in-Chief in Queenstown, who was to have operational control of dozens of American destroyers over the next eighteen months. The first six American destroyer captains were invited to dinner at Admiralty House the night they arrived. “Dine in undress; no speeches,” said Bayly’s in-vitation, and four of the six were asked to sleep over, “to get a good rest.” Taussig and his fellow Americans walked up the steep hill to Admiralty House overlooking the harbor and found at the top an unsmiling man with a weatherbeaten face and iron-gray hair, standing in a worn uniform with his hands behind his back. He shook hands, then turned to Taussig and asked, “When will you be ready to go to sea?”

“We are ready now, sir, as soon as we finish refueling,” Taussig said.

“I will give you four days from time of arrival. Will that be sufficient?”

On May 17, six more American destroyers arrived at Queenstown; another six came a week later. These and all subsequent American vessels arriving in Queenstown were placed under Bayly’s command because Sims had convinced his superiors in Washington that American warships in Europe—and the U.S. Navy as a whole—should be used as a reinforcement pool for the hard-pressed Allied navies. Sims rejected—and convinced his superiors in Washington to reject—any thought of attempting to operate an independent American fleet in Europe. The result was a remarkable suspension of national and service pride by the U.S. Navy to further the effort of winning the war. In this scheme, Bayly played his role to perfection. Soon after American destroyers arrived in Queenstown, most of Bayly’s British destroyers were transferred to the Channel and the North Sea, leaving the British admiral in command of a mostly American force. “He watched over our ships and their men with the jealous eye of a father,” said Sims. “He always referred to ‘my destroyers’ and ‘my Americans’ and woe to anyone who attempted to interfere with them. Once or twice a dispute arose between an American destroyer commander and a British; in such cases Admiral Bayly vigorously took the part of the American. ‘You did perfectly right,’ he would say to our men and then turn all his guns against the interfering Britisher.” Bayly’s effort to create an international force succeeded; American officers called him Uncle Lewis—sometimes to his face—and some brought him their personal problems. Bayly was a widower and his hostess was his Australian niece, Violet Voysey, who poured tea, presided over dinners, listened for hours, and made the Americans feel that Admiralty House was their temporary home.

Beyond this, a strong personal tie developed between Bayly and Sims. This had not been widely predicted. Bayly was a stern, hard-driving disciplinarian who, said one officer, “attributed his success to working a minimum of eleven hours a day on six days a week, never smoking before 10 p.m.
,
walking at least twenty miles on Sunday, playing tennis for an hour at 6:30 a.m. on fine mornings and running around Greenwich Park at 5:30 p.m.” He had few friends. Writing Taussig before the first American destroyers arrived, Sims had warned that Bayly was said to be “a peculiarly difficult man to deal with.” Sims had met Bayly at the Admiralty, “and when I was introduced to him he was very rude as he was also to some very high Admiralty officials present. It was evidently one of Admiral Bayly’s bad days.” Soon afterward, Bayly had a good day. “I do not consider that I am in charge of two different kinds of destroyers,” he wrote to Sims one week after Taussig arrived. “We are all one here. I have told the captains of your destroyers, as I tell ours, that the way to prevent misunderstandings and doubts is to come and see me. . . . I am always here and my business is to help them. Should you come here, please come to Admiralty House. I do not entertain but can make you comfortable.” Three weeks later, Sims received an even more unexpected letter: “I have a suggestion,” wrote Bayly. “If I should go on leave for 18 to 23 June, would you like to run the show in my absence? I should like it and you are the only man of whom I could truthfully say that. Your fellows would like it and it would have a good effect all around. . . . And if the Admiralty during my absence ‘regret that you should have,’ etc., I will take the blame. If they give you a DSO, keep it.” Sims was delighted, Jellicoe approved, and on June 18, 1917, the dark blue flag of an American admiral ran up in front of Admiralty House in Queenstown. For five days, Sims was Commander-in-Chief of all British and American naval forces operating on the coast of Ireland.

By the end of June, Bayly commanded twenty-eight American destroyers; by July 5, thirty-four; by the end of July, thirty-seven. Ultimately, 8,000 American seamen were based at Queenstown; when the war ended, there were seventy-nine American destroyers in European waters—at Queens-town, Brest, and Gibraltar. Of these, only one was lost to enemy action. This was
Jacob Jones,
sunk by a torpedo from
U-53.
This submarine’s captain was the celebrated Hans Rose, whose unexpected visit in October 1916 had astonished the citizens of Newport, Rhode Island. In May 1918, on the anniversary of the arrival of the first American destroyers in Queenstown, Bayly issued a memorandum to all U.S. naval forces under his command: “To command you is an honor, to work with you is a pleasure, and to know you is to know the best traits of the Anglo-Saxon race.”

No matter how many American destroyers arrived in Europe, submerged U-boats could not be destroyed until new weapons were developed. One of these was the hydrophone, a listening device designed to pick up the propeller sounds of a submarine underwater. In 1915, an early version of this instrument was able, under optimum conditions, to pick up submerged U-boats two miles away. But the hydrophone was useless when operated aboard a moving ship; the noise of the vessel’s own machinery and of water passing along the vessel’s hull drowned out the sounds made by a U-boat propeller. And if the hunting vessel stopped to listen in silence, it became an easy target for a torpedo. As work continued, hydrophones improved. Meanwhile, however, even when a submerged submarine was pinpointed, surface vessels had no weapon to destroy it. Often, British seamen had looked down to see the long, gray cigar shape of a submerged U-boat moving beneath them and been able to do nothing. Their frustrations were addressed in 1916, when the first depth charges came aboard their ships. A metal can or barrel containing 300 pounds of TNT and rolled off the stern of a destroyer, this weapon was detonated by a pressure fuse set for a specific depth. A thousand Type D depth charges were ordered in August 1916, and on December 13, 1916, the first U-boat perished in this terrible way. Production of depth charges was slow: early in 1917 the normal allotment to an Allied antisubmarine vessel was two. By early 1918, however, most antisubmarine craft were equipped with thirty-five to forty depth charges, and in the last ten months of the war, nineteen U-boats were sunk by depth-charge attack.

The horror of dying this way can only be imagined. Sims described such an attack as seen from the surface: “First, the depth charge exploded, causing a mushroom of water. . . . Immediately afterward, a secondary explosion was heard; this was a horrible and muffled sound coming from the deep, more powerful and more terrible than any that could have been caused by the destroyer’s ‘ash can.’ An enormous volcano of water and all kinds of debris arose from the sea. . . . As soon as the water subsided, great masses of heavy black oil began rising to the surface and completely splintered wood and other debris appeared.” In this case, death came quickly, but sometimes the end was prolonged. Sims also described a U-boat, located by hydrophones and heavily depth-charged, which then fell silent beneath the waves. “Then a propeller was heard faintly turning or attempting to turn . . . a slight grating or squeaking such as might have been made by damaged machinery. This noise lasted a few seconds and then stopped. Presently it started up again and then once more it stopped. The submarine was making a little progress, but fitfully; she would go a few yards and then pause.” The surface vessels dropped more depth charges and listened again. “There was a lumbering noise such as might be made by a heavy object trying to drag its hulk along the muddy bottom; this was followed by silence, showing that the wounded vessel could advance only a few yards.” By now, the surface vessels had used all of their depth charges and could only wait. “All night long, the listeners reported scraping and straining noises from below but these grew fainter and fainter.” They listened for hours and then, the following afternoon, heard “a sharp, piercing noise. . . . Only one thing in the world could make a sound like that . . . the crack of a revolver.” More of these pistol cracks followed, counted by the listeners above. “In all, twenty-five shots came from the bottom of the sea.” Then, silence.