Few naval leaders had seen the potential of the submarine before World
War I. But the British Grand Fleet was the first to feel the deadly force it
could wield. On September 1, 1914, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe received word
of submarine sightings near the main British naval base at Scapa Flow. His
battleships were forced to flee, in humiliating fashion, to the open waters
of the North Sea, where destroyer flotillas could protect them. Until antisubmarine
defenses could be put into place at Scapa Flow, Jellicoe was
compelled to use Lough Swilly on the Irish coast as his main base. But
disaster struck soon. At the close of September, three obsolete armored
cruisers, which the Admiralty leaders had carelessly placed near the Dutch
coast without destroyers to shield them, fell victim to a single submarine
within less than an hour. Jellicoe soon got word that 1 ,400 officers and men,
most of them recently mobilized naval reservists, had perished. The danger
became even more clear on October 27, when a German submarine sank
the ultramodern battleship Audacious off the northern coast of Ireland as it
sailed to engage in target practice. The loss was considered so catastrophic
that the Royal Navy throughout the war denied that the Audacious had been
more than damaged, i
In response to these calamities, Jellicoe conducted all major operations
with an eye to the danger from the submarine—and also from enemy
minefields. He refused to send his ships deep into enemy waters, and,
notably at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, he turned away from the enemy
rather than risk exposing his precious battleships to mortal danger. Thus,
the nature of naval warfare changed early in the war. The ultimate weapon,
reluctant as the admirals of the day were to admit it, was no longer the
battleship but the tiny underwater vessel that could put a torpedo into a great
vessel's hull below the waterline.
To be sure, there were British submarines at work as well. They served
as a scouting force for the Grand Fleet, and they found an occasional victim
in the form of a war vessel, like the German light cruiser Hela, which a
British submarine sank off the coast of Heligoland on September 13. But
they had few German merchant ships to target outside the Baltic.
World History
