A Higher Form of Killing (7 page)

Holland was not the only man developing submarines. Thorsten Nordenfelt in Sweden and British clergyman the Reverend George William Garrett were creating their own designs. Queen Victoria’s chaplain endorsed Garrett’s company’s prospectus, reassuring investors with familiar arguments: “As to the invention being for murdering people—this is all nonsense. Every contribution made by science to improve instruments of war makes war shorter and, in the end, less terrible to human life and to human progress.”

Although Garrett, and in particular Nordenfelt, had some success, Holland maintained his lead. His sixth prototype, the
Holland VI
,
constructed in 1898 in New Jersey, was nearly fifty-four feet long. Powered by a forty-five horsepower petrol engine for surface cruising and for recharging the batteries of a fifty-horsepower electric motor that drove the craft when submerged, her main weapon was a torpedo launched from an eighteen-inch torpedo tube. She made her first successful dive off Staten Island on Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1898. Her formal trials ten days later so impressed then assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt that he recommended that the navy purchase the vessel which on April 11, 1900,
became the USS
Holland
(
SS-1
).

A powerful lobby within the British Admiralty continued to dismiss submersibles as “not our concern.” In 1900 Lord Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, asserted that “submarines were a weapon for Maritime Powers on the defensive.” His parliamentary secretary was categoric: “The Admiralty are not prepared to take any steps in regard to submarines because this vessel is only the weapon of the weaker nation.” Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, VC, Controller of the Royal Navy, fulminated: “Underwater weapons, they call ’em. I call them underhand, unfair and damned un-English. They’ll never be any use in war and I’ll tell you why: I’m going to get the First Lord to announce that we intend to treat all submarines as pirate vessels in wartime and that we’ll hang all the crews.”

Nevertheless with the support of Admiral Jacky Fisher and his belief in “the immense impending revolution which the submarines will effect as offensive weapons of war,” in 1901 the British Admiralty ordered five Holland boats to be built in England by Vickers under license. The first was launched at Barrow-in-Furness the same year. The British vessels first introduced the periscope to the submarine—the U.S. Holland boats had had to surface so that men could look through the glass ports in the conning tower.

In 1901 German secretary of state for the navy Admiral Tirpitz declared that Germany had no need of submarines. In spring 1904 he was still lecturing the Reichstag about his contempt for submarine warfare but that July, reacting to Britain’s program, he announced the building of a submarine. The German navy’s first Unterseeboot—the
U-1—
was completed in 1906 at Krupp’s plant in Kiel.

The torpedoes which armed all submarines were named after the crampfish or electric ray and pioneered by British engineer Robert Whitehead. While working in Austria for a company supplying the Austro-Hungarian navy, he developed in strict secrecy an “automobile device” driven by compressed air which could travel at eight knots and carry dynamite. Soon after he perfected a depth-keeping mechanism. The Royal Navy invited him home to demonstrate the new weapon and in 1870 concluded that “any maritime nation failing to provide itself with submarine locomotive torpedoes would be neglecting a great source of power both for offence and defence” and paid fifteen thousand pounds for the right to manufacture his torpedoes. Other nations quickly followed suit.

The first torpedoes were designed to be fired from surface vessels and had spectacular success in the Russo-Japanese War. Admiral Fisher predicted the weapon “would play a most important part in future wars” since ships as currently constructed were powerless against them and “the constant dread of sudden destruction” would demoralize seamen. By 1904 the British Holland submarines had a one in two chance of hitting a destroyer from a range of three hundred to four hundred feet with their improved torpedoes.

Perhaps the area where Britain’s commercial as distinct from naval maritime supremacy was at the greatest risk as the delegates to the London Maritime Conference assembled was the transatlantic passenger trade—just as now for airlines one of the most profitable sources of revenue.

American Moses Rogers pioneered steam propulsion across the Atlantic when in 1819 he captained the paddle steamer
Savannah
to Liverpool, although the vessel used steam for only eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day voyage and sailed for the rest of the time. The first ship to steam continuously across the Atlantic was the British
Sirius
in 1838. She was fitted with the recently invented marine surface condensers which prevented her boilers from becoming clogged with salt.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1787, Samuel Cunard was already a successful businessman when in 1838 the British government invited tenders to carry transatlantic mail by steamer. He hurried to London where he won a contract to carry the mail to and from America twice a month for a fee of fifty-five thousand pounds. In July 1840 the first of Cunard’s fleet, the paddle steamer
Britannia
, made her maiden voyage from Liverpool, reaching Boston in fourteen days.

Charles Dickens never forgot his voyage to America on the
Britannia
in 1842. He derided his cabin as “an utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box.” The only thing conceivably smaller for sleeping in would be “a coffin” and the flat quilt that covered him was “like a surgical plaster [bandage].” Furthermore, there was as much chance of accommodating his wife’s luggage as of persuading a giraffe “into a flower pot.” Bad weather forced him to spend a great deal of time in the cabin and he felt seasick. “Read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) . . . ; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy and water with unspeakable disgust and ate hard biscuits perseveringly,” he wrote. “Not ill, but going to be.”

British and American lines dominated the transatlantic route, using more and more sophisticated ships, until in 1889 the kaiser, impressed by a new British White Star Line vessel he saw at a British naval review, decided “we must have some of these.” By 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the huge 14,350-ton
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
was the fastest liner on the Atlantic with a top speed of over twenty-one knots, taking the Blue Riband for the Atlantic crossing on her maiden voyage. By 1903, German companies owned the four fastest ships crossing the Atlantic.

In 1902 the American banker John Pierpont Morgan bought the White Star Line for twenty-five million dollars for the new shipping conglomerate he was building—International Mercantile Marine (IMM). Having negotiated an alliance with the two main German lines, Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd, he approached Cunard, the only major line still in British ownership, with an offer for the company’s shares at 80 percent above the market value.

The British press railed against the “ ‘Morganization’ of the Atlantic” and warned of the consequences of losing “the great north Atlantic trade, the only trade which can support ships of great speed and tonnage so essential as cruisers in time of war.” The British government feared that Germany would soon have a fleet of nine liners, all of which could outstrip the fastest British steamers. Its stark choice lay between acquiescing in the acquisition of Cunard by IMM or rescuing Cunard “for the nation” through a large government subsidy. While the debate ebbed and flowed an aging Cunard liner broke down in mid-Atlantic and had to be towed to the Azores by an IMM tramp steamer. The press highlighted the disturbing symbolism.

In July 1903 the British government agreed to lend Cunard £2,600,000 to build two new ships, subsequently named the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania
, that with a top speed of at least twenty-four-and-a-half knots could outstrip the upstart German liners and whose specifications the Admiralty would approve. It also agreed to pay Cunard an annual subsidy of £150,000 for maintaining both vessels in a state of war readiness, together with £68,000 for carrying the mail. In return, the Admiralty had the right to commandeer the ships for use as auxiliary merchant cruisers, troopships, or hospital ships.

The
Lusitania
was the first of the two ships to enter service, making her maiden transatlantic voyage in September 1907 during the second Hague Conference. She was half the size again of any vessel yet built, and three quarters more powerful. Novel features included high-tensile steel in her hull for additional strength and electric controls for steering, for closing her 175 watertight compartments, and for detecting fire. On her first arrival in New York the American newspapers hailed the luxury of a ship that was “more beautiful than Solomon’s Temple and big enough to hold all his wives.” On her second westbound crossing she won back the Blue Riband.

At the conference of the ten leading maritime nations in London in 1908, Britain’s commercial interests as a supplier and transporter of much of the world’s trade dominated the policy of Campbell-Bannerman and his Liberal Party government rather than what might become its naval interests if it became involved in a war. Other delegations too emphasized the importance of trade and freedom of the seas. Consequently, no change was made to the old Cruiser Rules to allow for new, modern technologies such as the submarine. Merchant ships still could not be sunk without warning; rather, they had to be stopped and searched for contraband and, if it was found, the crew given the time to take to the boats before the vessel was sunk or seized as a prize. Tight definitions were drawn up of what constituted “contraband,” differentiating between goods clearly intended for military use such as weapons and those for civilian use. Some goods such as blankets or cloth were defined as “conditional contraband,” which could be used for either military or civil purposes. Before they could be seized and destroyed their use and destination had to be established. Close blockades of an enemy’s ports by warships at the edge of territorial waters remained acceptable.

Mahan—now an admiral—was a frustrated American delegate at the conference, unable to make his sterner views on the need to allow greater freedom of action by navies toward their enemies prevail even within his own U.S. delegation. However, after the conference ended he continued to voice his concerns. They were taken up by some of his followers in Britain who argued that by ratifying the conference decisions, Britain would forfeit its naval supremacy. A heated debate followed in Britain further fueled by the 1909 “naval scare” resulting from a German decision to accelerate its battleship-building program. As a consequence, Britain never ratified the revised rules agreed to in London. Neither, under renewed pressure from Mahan, did the United States. Without the signature of two of the leading maritime nations the new provisions never came into force. First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher took little part in the debates about the British attitude, either cynically content to disregard the rules if Britain ever went to war or more likely too preoccupied with the feuding over new training procedures and gunnery practice with more hidebound colleagues which would soon precipitate his retirement in January 1910.

By now the Balkans were the most likely source of conflict. In 1908–9, a prolonged confrontation stopping short of war flared up between Serbia—backed by Russia—and Austro-Hungary after the latter took Bosnia-Herzegovina from the crumbling Ottoman Turkish Empire. In 1912–13, the independent Balkan states, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece, first combined to defeat the Ottoman Turks and seize from them nearly all their remaining European territory and then fell out among themselves about the division of the spoils. Serbia was the principal winner, emerging with a doubling of its territory and increased national self-confidence. Austro-Hungary, since 1879 bound in tight alliance to Germany, felt it had lost out by not intervening in the 1912–13 conflicts and saw inherent problems for its diverse empire if pan-Slavism, and with it Russian influence, grew further.

Many observers comforted themselves that the Balkan conflicts had been confined to that region. Nevertheless the European arms buildup continued. In 1911, thirty-six-year-old Winston Churchill, then a member of the Liberal Party, had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty—the overall head of the organization to whom the professional head, the First Sea Lord, reported. The First Lord of the Admiralty in turn reported to Parliament and the cabinet, and was a member of both. Churchill, described in his early years in Parliament by an opponent as “restless, egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality,” had in 1911–12 headed inconclusive discussions with Germany about a pause in the naval arms race. The British naval budget, with its emphasis on high technology had, at more than forty-five million pounds, quadrupled over the last quarter of a century and was taking an increasing proportion of the rising national defense budget. Churchill tried again in 1913, contacting the German naval attaché in London, but he was thwarted by the response of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who suggested that the approach was a mere ploy to delay Germany’s naval program.

The kaiser had appointed Tirpitz—then still to earn his ennobling ‘von’— Germany’s secretary of state for the navy in June 1897. Nine days later, Tirpitz had written in a memorandum: “For Germany at the moment the most dangerous naval enemy is England . . . The strategy against England demands battleships in as great a number as possible.” Thereafter he had been the inspiration and architect for Germany’s naval expansion, his views on naval matters mirroring those of Fisher and Mahan. Just as the latter two could not always effectively control their changing political masters, he could never be certain of the febrile, inconsistent kaiser’s reactions, writing: ’“I could never discover how to ward off the frequent interference of the Emperor whose imagination, once it had fixed on shipbuilding, was fed by all manner of impressions . . . Suggestions are cheap in the Navy and change like a kaleidoscope.”