The Great War Society, incorporated in 1986, is committed to the study of the First World
War and subsequent world events associated with that cataclysm and their importance for our
lives today. The journal of the Society, Relevance, is published quarterly. Annual seminars
are held at various locations throughout the country, bringing together members, guests, and
renowned scholars to discuss the events of the Great War in more depth. Information about
our seminars and special events like our annual Armistice-Veterans Day commemorative will
be available on the website, announced in Relevance and distributed in mailings.
The Great War Society is a California nonprofit corporation
and is exempt from income taxes under section 501(c)(3) of
the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to The Great War
Society are deductible to donors on their federal and state
income tax returns. Also deductible are $30.00 of annual
membership dues.
A Message from Our President
NEW VISION - NEW MISSION - NEW RESOLVE
I want to say “hello” to all of my fellow Society members and to everyone
who loves history – especially those who share an interest in the Great War.
In my interview on page 20 in this special double issue of Relevance, you
can read about many of the new goals for our organization as it works
towards the upcoming centennial celebrations from 2014-2019. One of the
most important changes is what has happened to Relevance – it has more
pages, more illustrations and more information. These improvements are
due to the efforts of the journal’s new editor, Michael Hanlon. Mike’s
extensive knowledge of the First World War and his considerable
experience in writing and publishing are essential to helping us build
awareness and education about this incredible period of history. We are
very fortunate to have Mike in this key role.
Board of Directors:
Dana Lombardy, President
Diane B. Rooney,
Director of Marketing
Thomas F. Olson, Secretary
Robert C. Denison, Treasurer
Salvatore Compagno,
President Emeritus
East Bay Chapter Chairman
Jack P. Creighton,
Director at Large
Robert J. Rudolph,
San Francisco Chap. Chairman
Herbert P. Stickel,
Director at Large
Robert H. Warwick,
Membership Chairman
George E. Young, Jr.,
Director at Large
Communicate With Us Through:
Email: dlombardy@earthlink net
We also have a new Mission Statement for The Great War Society that will
help us focus our efforts (also p. 20) and we have started building a
redesigned website that will engage the serious student of World War I as
well as the casual visitor. As excited as I am about all of the new things our
Society will be doing, they are only possible due to your support. This is
the time of year to renew your membership or join us for the first time. A
form and return envelope are included with this issue of Relevance, or you
can pay online at:
www.the-great-war-society.org
(Under Construction)
Together we can make a difference!
Dana Lombardy, President
The Great War Society
2
Website:
www.the-great-war-society.org
Mail: Inquiries, Membership and
Submittals for Relevance:
The Great War Society
P.O. Box 18585
Stanford, CA 94309
Annual Membership:
$49 - Receive Printed Version of
Relevance (four issues)
$39 - Quarterly Online Download
of Relevance (four issues)
Payments accepted online at our website
Michael E. Hanlon, Editor
Kimball Worcester, Assistant Editor
Tony Langley, Contributing Editor
Contents
2
About the Great War Society
Our organization, membership, directors and President's Message
4
News from the Western Front
Three new monuments were dedicated recently in the Argonne Sector
5
Feature Article - Defeating the U-boat, Part One: "We Are Losing the War"
Jan S. Breemer
A fresh look at the U-boat Campaign
20
Meet Our New President: Dana Lombardy
Interviewed by GWS Marketing Director Diane Rooney
Dana discusses his plans for organizational growth and preparing for the Great War's Centennial
23
Some of the Best of Our Website
A diverse selection from the huge amount of information we provide online
29
Feature Article - Defeating the U-boat, Part Two: The Convoy System
Jan S. Breemer
Coming to terms with an unprecedented threat
42
Trivia Challenge: Recognizing Your War Poets
A new feature to test your First World War knowledge
43
Book and Film Reviews
Major Internet articles from Len Shurtleff of Len's Bookshelf and Andrew Melomet at
Andy's Nickelodeon
47
The 90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
Map and key locations of America's greatest battlefield of the Great War
48
Documentary History
President Woodrow Wilson announces the Armistice
COPYRIGHT©2008 The Great War Society
From the Editor:
As our new President Dana Lombardy mentions in his message (p. 2), I've been asked to assume the editorship of Relevance with this
issue. He has requested I provide high-quality content, covering every aspect of the First World War. For my first issue, I am lucky to
inherit a fascinating article by Jan S. Breemer, Professor of National Security Decision Making at the U.S. Naval War College in
Monterey, California. A noted expert on submarine warfare, particularly the Soviet and Russian fleets, he has provided a fascinating study
of the birth of anti-submarine warfare in the First World War. I have supplemented Professor Breemer's two-part major article with new
features for our readers: interviews (our first features the new GWS President), news from the battlefields, a trivia challenge, and in-depth
reviews from Len Shurtleff (who has appeared on these pages before) for books and Andrew Melomet, who has been contributing film
reviews to my monthly online newsletter, the St. Mihiel Trip-Wire, for five years. I hope you enjoy this first effort.
MH
Cover: Anti-submarine mine detonated from British destroyer
from The War of Nations, Vol. 40, July 17, 1915
3
News From the Western Front
90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive Commemorated
Recently, a series of events have been held in the Argonne region, north of Verdun, to honor the memory of
those who fought in the region, especially in the great offensive of September 26 - November 11, 1918. Three
new memorials have been dedicated and are pictured below. Inside the back cover of this issue of Relevance
you find a map of the Meuse-Argonne area showing the later stages of the operation and the line at the
Armistice. To find the location of each of these monuments on the map, just match the letter.
A. Near the small hamlet of Chaumont-devantDamvillers east of the River Meuse, one minute
before the Armistice, Baltimore's Sgt. Henry
Gunther, 313th Inf., 79th Div., became the last
American soldier to be killed in action during the
war. Last September 24 this monument, raised on
the initiative of Pierre Lenhard, a local historian,
was unveiled by Jean-Marie Bockel, the French
Secretary of State for Defense and Veterans near the
site of Gunther's death.
B. The most remembered incident of America's
Great War experience was the Lost Battalion, a
collection of men from the 77th New York
Division, under the command of Lt. Col. Charles
Whittlesey, who were surrounded for five days on
a hillside near the village of Binarville. This
monument to their sacrifice was dedicated near the
village on October 7. It also honors Cher Ami, the
messenger pigeon who helped bring relief.
C. On October 4, 2008 in and around the village
of Châtel-Chéhéry a series of events were held to
remember the heroics of Alvin York of the 82nd
Division of the AEF 90 years earlier. A historic
education trail planned by the research team led by
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Doug Mastriano was dedicated,
just north of the town. The York family was also
honored. Shown here (l-r) at one of the trail's key
informational panels are Alvin York's son George
York, grandson Gerald York and his greatgranddaughter Deborah York.
4
Photos by Christina Holstein & Doug Mastriano
Part One: "We Are Losing the War"
On April 10, 1917, Rear-Admiral William
Sowden Sims, US Navy sat across from the
Royal Navy's Admiral of the Fleet Sir John
Rushworth Jellicoe. Sims and his aide had
arrived in London on that same day, less
than 24 hours after their passenger steamer
had docked in Liverpool. While they were
at sea, on April 6, the American Congress
had declared war on Germany and its allies.
Anticipating hostilities, U.S. Navy
Secretary Josephus Daniels had ordered
Sims to London to, in Sims' own words,
"get in touch with the British Admiralty, to
study the naval situation and learn how we
could best and most quickly cooperate in
the naval war." Now, sitting across from
him - "calm, smiling and imperturbable" was the First Sea Lord. With operational
Presented by Permission of Jan S. Breemer
5
responsibility for the entire British navy,
Jellicoe was well placed to confirm the
belief of Sims and most Americans that the
British "had the situation well in hand."
They did not. Sims was shocked to learn that
the struggle against the U-boats had been
far less successful than was being portrayed
in the American and British newspapers.
When he realized that the number of
sinkings of British and neutral merchantmen was three and four times larger than
reported, Sims observed, "It looks as
though the Germans were winning the war."
Jellicoe agreed. New, promising weapons,
notably the depth charge, were being
developed, but if the U-boats kept up their
current pace of sinkings, they would not be
ready in time. That was why it was critical
All Rights Reserved by the Author
that the U.S. Navy immediately send help in
the way of destroyers and other small
vessels. After his meeting, Sims cabled
Washington that, "Briefly stated, I consider
that at the present moment we are losing the
war." He also warned U.S. Navy Secretary
Josephus Daniels that reports of British
tactical successes against the U-boats
should be treated with a great deal of
skepticism. He wrote: "Accept no reports of
submarine losses as authentic and certain
unless survivors are captured or the
submarine itself definitely located by
dragging." (emphasis in the original). The
April report on monthly ship losses seemed
to bear out Sims's fear. In what would turn
out to be the peak month of the U-boats'
productivity, 860,334 tons of shipping were
sunk. Also, the exchange rate between the
numbers of Allied ships lost versus U-boats
sunk was, from the defender's perspective,
the worst ever - 167:1.
Seventeen months later, in what historian
Paul Halpern called a "curiously
anticlimactic" occasion, the German
submarine fleet raised the black flag of
surrender. Between November 20 and
December 1, 1918, 114 U-boats gave
themselves up in British ports; more were
seized in German harbors. In October, the
last full month of the war, shipping losses
had declined to 116,237 tons. As a result of
this happy turn of events, wrote one British
army officer, he and his fellow officers at
the Allied headquarters in France had
lacked only "certain material - particularly. . .
chocolate, biscuits, and tinned fruits in the
canteens."
How had the desperate situation Sims was
told about in the spring of 1917 come to
6
pass? How was it possible that a craft that
had shown its seaworthiness only two
decades before and which, right up to the
war, was still being dismissed by many
naval officers as more dangerous to its own
crew than its intended victim, had managed
to effectively neutralize the most powerful
fleet in the world? When it did, the
submarine had overturned one of the most
sacred tenets of the prevailing conception of
sea power - the notion, expressed most
cogently only a few years before by Alfred
Thayer Mahan, that sea power was about
command of the sea and that its possession
turned on victory in a decisive battle
between fleets of dreadnoughts. According
to this dogma, the side that won command
had accomplished two things simultaneously: First, "owning" command meant
that the opponent could no longer use
the sea for its purposes, e.g., ship goods and
raw materials, or threaten seaborne
landings; second, the side in command had
the unfettered use of the sea for its own
purposes, such as moving supplies and
troops, launching attacks against the enemy
shore and so forth. The tonnage war waged
by the U-boats revolutionized naval warfare
by rendering obsolete this basic principle of
pre-World War I naval thinking. The
transformation of naval warfare from the
surface of the seas to the water column
below served to bifurcate command of the
sea. Britain in 1917 still controlled the seas
in, as Sims put it, the "old Nelsonian sense" its Grand Fleet of dreadnoughts kept its
German High Seas counterpart in port, and
the German merchant fleet had effectively
disappeared from the oceans, but that same
Grand Fleet could not guarantee the safety
of Britain's own trade routes and ensure the
arrival of foodstuffs, war supplies, etc.
In the end, of course, the British and their
allies did manage to defeat the U-boat's
strategic goal of economic strangulation.
The U-boat's defeat at the strategic level of
war bears emphasizing because it can be
argued with considerable force that the
Allies never quite managed to defeat the
German submarine fleet tactically or
technically. True, U-boat losses in absolute
terms went up very significantly in 1917
and 1918 from 22 in 1916 to 63 and 69 in
1917 and 1918, respectively. Much of this
was due to the introduction of the depth
charge and better mines. But these gains
become less significant when it is realized
that, thanks to new construction, the overall
size of the U-boat threat remained fairly constant. (Table p. 17) Moreover, it stands to
reason that the probability of a U-boat being
detected and attacked successfully went up as
more and more U-boats went to sea.
Countering the submarine's revolutionary
impact on the old command-of-the-sea
principle and restoring the ability to use the
seas at acceptable cost called for equally
revolutionary countermeasures. Those
countermeasures had little to do with new
weapons and technologies. Both did play a
role, of course, notably the depth charge and
hydroacoustic devices. These and other
technological innovations, however, made a
comparatively small contribution to the
conceptual counterrevolution that was at the
heart of the U-boat's final defeat. The defeat
of the U-boat in World War I was made
possible, first and foremost, by
compromising what was arguably the very
ethos of the naval profession, namely the
belief that wars at sea were fought and won
by aggressively seeking out and sinking the
enemy.
"The Submarine Boat Does Not and
Cannot Revolutionize Naval Warfare"
The submarine is history's first "absolute
weapon." It is so because never before had a
weapon been created that so much defied
our scientific and ability to quickly produce
a counterweapon. The submarine was the
first weapon to go about its war-making
business in the third dimension, producing
an unprecedented challenge for the
development of countermeasures.
Fighting ranges at the time the submarine
appeared on the scene had expanded to
thousands of yards, and the problem of
hitting a moving ship from a platform that
itself is moving was only barely being
solved. The submarine's ability to navigate
not only on a plane but also up and down,
presented an even more complex firecontrol problem - even for a visible target.
7
The submarine's invisibility - at least some
of the time - and its ability therefore to
move and attack unseen, posed an
unprecedented problem for the traditional
tools of naval power. In fact, there were two
problems: First, how does a ship moving on
the surface of the oceans defend itself
against attack below the belt; second, if it
survives an attack, how does it seek out and
sink an unseen attacker?
enemy to show up. This offensive ethos had
difficulty accommodating mines. They were
seen as defensive weapons and the
"asymmetric" - and rather unsporting resort of the weaker power.
"The Submarine Boat Is Absolutely
Unattackable"
It was patently obvious, of course, that the
problem of finding and destroying an enemy
submarine could not be solved by another
submarine. Very limited research toward
solving the first half of the anti-submarine
warfare (ASW) problem - detecting the
submarine - had begun in the early 1890s
and focused on developing a practical
hydrophone. However, little progress was
made during the next couple of decades;
when war broke out, only a handful of ships
had been fitted with a mix of British- and
U.S.-made systems. Under favorable
conditions, i.e. a calm sea with little wind
and with the engines stopped, it was
sometimes possible to actually hear a noisy
U-boat. But these were rare occasions, and,
in any case, the early devices were "omnidirectional" systems, that is to say, they
could not tell which direction the noise
came from.
As far as destroying the submarine was
concerned, efforts during the pre-war years
were concentrated - naturally enough - on
developing some sort of underwater
explosive. Sea mines were already familiar
weapons of war; many countries, including
Great Britain, relied on shore-controlled
minefields to protect ports and harbors. In
Britain - as in the United States - this
"static" defense of the coast with guns and
minefields was the army's responsibility,
the navy being left free to pursue would-be
invaders on the high seas. This burdensharing fully reflected the Royal Navy's selfimage as a "blue water" force: It existed to
seek out the enemy wherever he might be not to be tied to the coast and wait for the
Admiral Fisher told Prime Minister Asquith
in a memorandum less than four months
before war broke out:
(N)o word of a submarine destroyer
has ever been heard because it has
been forced upon us, by experience,
that submarines cannot fight
submarines, nor has any successful
antidote been found even by the most
bitter anti-submarine experts with
unlimited means for experiments.
Although it was well known, on the eve of
World War I, that the submarine of 1914
was capable of venturing much further out
to sea than its first generation predecessor, it
was still expected to busy itself mainly with
defense against a would-be blockading fleet
and with surreptitious, long-range scouting.
Radio had improved considerably, and it
was thought that forward-deployed
submarines could give early warning of
enemy fleet movements. Ironically, the
submarine became the surveillance platformof-choice, in part because, by 1914, its atsea endurance was better than that of most
destroyers. Most important, neither side Britain or Germany - had given but the most
fleeting thought that the submarine might be
used against other than "legitimate" naval
targets, i.e. gray hulls.
8
It has been suggested by some writers that
the Admiralty's failure to prepare for a
submarine anti-tonnage war was
understandable in light of the prevailing
not interfere with what the service saw as its
primary responsibility: seek out and battle
the enemy's fleet. The Admiralty reluctantly
acknowledged its responsibility for the safe
arrival of overseas foodstuffs, but it made it
patently clear that it would brook no
political interference in its war preparations.
international attitude toward war among
"civilized nations" - sinking unarmed
merchantmen simply was "not done."
Winston Churchill, then the Admiralty's
First Lord (roughly the equivalent of
minister of the navy) fairly summed up this
attitude in a memo to Admiral Fisher, after
the latter had written that Germany would
likely use her submarines against Britain's
commerce. Churchill thought his senior
naval officer had written an "excellent"
paper but that it was "to some extent,
marred by the prominence" it gave to the
idea of a U-boat commerce war. "I do not
believe," he wrote, "this would ever be done
by a civilized power." To emphasize his
abhorrence, he suggested that, should the
Germans go ahead anyway, this would
justify brutal retaliatory measures, such as
spreading pestilence, poisoning the water of
the perpetrator's great cities and
assassinating its leaders. Interestingly, in
what seems to be a case of wishful thinking,
some naval officers thought that the
submarine's very inability to abide by the
prize regulations meant that it could not and
would not pose a threat to commerce.
The rejection of the idea that a civilized
power would callously destroy private
property on the high seas was certainly
understandable - the concept of "total war"
between nations, not just armies, had yet to
be born. But this alone cannot explain
Britain's dismal lack of preparedness. The
fact of the matter is that, for the Royal
Navy, the protection of commerce, be it
against raiders on the surface of the sea or
underneath, was an unglamorous, secondary
and, worst of all, a defensive priority which,
from the Admiralty's point of view, could
Until his retirement in 1910, Fisher in
particular warned how swarms of U-boats
would make the "Narrow Seas" quite
untenable by conventional warships. One of
his publicists, retired army colonel Charles
à Court Repington, "leaked" Fisher's views
in a series of journal articles in 1910, which
concluded that, "there will be no place for
any great ship in the North Sea." With what
turned out to be a surprising prescience, he
painted a submarine anti-tonnage campaign
that would affect the ability to feed "some
tens of millions," cause a great rise in food
and fuel prices and very possibly food riots.
Since nothing had been invented or built to
defeat the U-boat, he wrote, "Nothing we
can effect with naval means can, with any
certainty, prevent German submarines from
putting to sea when they please, and from
appearing off our coasts at their own sweet
will."
9
Few among the British naval leadership,
though, subscribed to Fisher and
Repington's bleak prognosis. Most appear to
have shared then-Rear Admiral Jellicoe's
view instead. It basically held that the Uboat would almost certainly make the
planning and execution of a decisive fleetagainst-fleet battle much more complicated,
but that with enough energy and effort, the
problem would be brought under control
and the North Sea made safe for a modernday Trafalgar.
(the co-location of gasoline engines
and unshielded electrical wiring did
not help), the craft was blind when
submerged (functional periscopes did not
appear until after 1904), and together these
two limitations made the vessel highly
accident-prone. Matters were very different,
however, on the eve of World War I:
between 1904 and 1914 the submarine had
become a reliable and seaworthy
navigational and weapons-carrying
platform. This is not an ex post facto
assessment - in exercise after exercise
during the immediate pre-war years,
"lessons learned" by naval professionals on
both sides of the North Sea highlighted the
submarine's growing high-seas range and
stamina.
The idea of using submarines to attack
commerce was certainly known and
discussed in professional journals.
According to Germany's official account of
the war at sea, the U-boat arm's younger
officers - who were more familiar with the
new diesel boats' capabilities - were
particularly enthusiastic proponents. There
is no evidence, however, that any formal
planning took place before the war. Instead,
pre-war planning for the U-boat flotillas
was focused mainly on how they could best
be used to create favorable conditions for a
decisive fleet battle. Specifically, the
U-boats were seen as the key to whittling
down the numerically superior Grand Fleet
to approximate parity (Kräfteausgleich)
with the High Sea Fleet. Then, and only
then, would the German dreadnoughts sally
forth and engage their enemy counterparts
in a modern-day Trafalgar. The only
problem was that the British had come to
the same conclusion: that the "Narrow Seas"
would likely be a submarine and mine trap.
The U-boats would soon take their toll
among patrolling cruisers and destroyers,
but the prize targets, the Grand Fleet's
battleships and battle cruisers, kept their
distance in northernmost Scotland.
The turn-of-the-century submarine was
barely able to "keep the sea." Machinery
and weapons frequently broke down
10
Because the craft would spend most of the
time on the surface, it was theoretically
more susceptible to detection. Practically
though, the risk was small. Exercises had
repeatedly demonstrated that a submarine in
an awash condition, i.e. with only the
conning tower sticking out of the water, was
extremely difficult to spot. Usually, the
submarine made the "first detection" in
plenty of time to disappear below the
waves. Nevertheless, partly as the result of a
series of disastrous collisions with surface
ships, much was done prior to the outbreak
of World War I to speed up the ability to
submerge. Some of the early boats needed
as much as 15 minutes, but by 1914 a diving
time of five minutes or less had become
standard for a boat when fully surfaced and
about one minute from an awash condition.
When submerged, the average submarine of
1904 could navigate to a depth of about 35
meters; ten years later, 50 meters was
common. Even before the war started, the
technology was in hand to operate at the
much greater depths that became practice by
1917. However, until the invention the
depth charge, there was no obvious need for
doing so.
In addition, the submarine's armament had
become more lethal. Despite its
comparatively high cost and indifferent
performance during the Russo-Japanese war
of 1904-05, the torpedo had become firmly
established as the boat's principal weapons
system. The typical torpedo of 1914 was,
like its predecessor of 1904, a "straightrunner" with pre-set guidance provided by a
gyroscope. The weight of the warhead on
the 1914 torpedo, too, was not much
different from the 1904 model - about 200
pounds; a contact fuse was still the only
means to trigger the device. Important
improvements had come in speed and
striking range.
The evolution of the submarine from a nearshore, low-endurance defensive weapon to
an ocean-going offensive platform
coincided with the maturation of wireless
for reliable, long-distance communication.
Very early in the war the Germans found
that their equipment was far better than they
themselves had thought. In early 1915,
reliable ship-to-shore communications up to
140 nautical miles was possible. Not long
afterward, radio contact up to 1,000 nautical
miles was established, and, by the middle of
1915, U-boats maintained regular
communications with their headquarters in
Wilhelmshaven from as far away as the
Atlantic and Mediterranean. Ironically, the
very excellence of the U-boats' radio gear
created an unexpected vulnerability in that it
encouraged crews to engage in what Patrick 11
Beesley called "unduly garrulous" behavior.
The result was that, starting in late 1914, the
code-breakers of the British Naval
Intelligence Division's "Room 40" supplied
a steady stream of "strategic" intelligence
about the U-boat fleet's strength and general
whereabouts. This information was
complemented, in the spring of 1915, by
"radio plots" that marked the location of
individual U-boats. These plots were the
product of a chain of radio direction-finding
stations that were erected along the coast of
England and Ireland early in that year.
Using the intersection of at least two radio
bearings, plots were accurate to within a
radius of 20 to 50 nautical miles. This kind
of information would prove extremely
useful for the routing of convoys, but it
rarely, if ever, was accurate or timely
enough to bring about a successful tactical
prosecution by a "hunter-killer" sloop or
destroyer.
Later in the war, when the U-boats seemed
frightfully close to their goal of economic
strangulation, Britain's chief of naval staff
lamely defended the pre-war failure to
innovate against the submarine by
suggesting there had been no pressing need
at the time. "(I)t should be remembered," he
said, "that the submarine was in its infancy
at the outbreak of war…" The problem was
that, if the U-boat of 1914 was in its
"infancy," anti-submarine warfare had yet to
be born!
Planning Defensive Measures Against Germany's U-boats
The offensive ethos of the Royal Navy led to difficulties
anticipating the use of defensive weapons against submarines.
Admiral Roger Bacon reports in his post-World War I account
of his command of the so-called “Dover Patrol,” how, before
the war, mines were “viewed askance…since we, the strongest
Power, always fostered the idea that it was our business to
tempt the enemy to come out and fight, and not block him in."
"As for the U-Boats, the Admiralty Says Little But Does Much"
The new asymmetric nature of war at
sea became dramatically evident on
September 22, 1914. On that day, a single
submarine, the U-9, managed to sink, within
one hour, three armored cruisers - Aboukir,
Cressy, Hogue - on routine patrol in the
North Sea. Over 2,500 men died - more than
at Trafalgar. Julian Corbett wrote after the
war how, "(N)othing that had yet occurred
had so emphatically proclaimed the change
that had come over naval warfare, and never
perhaps had so great a result been obtained
by means relatively so small."
U-9 in Harbor After Its Successful Attack of September 22, 1914
When Britain declared war on Germany on
August 4, 1914, the Royal Navy boasted the
world's most numerous submarine fleet - 77.
France, with some 60 boats, took second
place. Germany, by contrast, owned a grand
total of only 28. Several were already
obsolete, but the ten last-built boats (U1928) were, without a doubt, superior to any
foreign-built submarine. Sixteen additional
U-boats were under construction, and
additional orders were placed between
August and November. If the diminutive
size of this force alone is not proof that
Germany's naval planners were not then
thinking in terms of a major war against
commerce, the following may be: almost
until the very day war was declared,
Germany's largest U-boat yard, the
12
Germaniawerft, was negotiating - with
the approval of the naval staff - with the
Greek government over the sale of five
U-boats on order for Germany's own navy.
Limited numbers were one reason why it
took some time for the submarine's
revolutionary impact on war to be registered. The other reason was that, during the
first six moths of the war, Germany used
the U-boats mostly according to the "old,"
pre-revolutionary rules of sea warfare. That
is to say, the U-boats were employed as
"legitimate" weapons of war against
"legitimate" targets of war, to wit, the
enemy's fleet. Since this was precisely what
the British had expected all along, the results, though dramatic on occasion, fell far
short of the goal of creating a more even
balance of dreadnought power. For one
thing, the Grand Fleet gave the U-boats few
opportunities to stalk and attack its
battleships. The Fleet had retreated to its
anchorage at Scapa Flow in northernmost
Scotland whence it made occasional
"sweeps" into the North Sea. The daily
routine of enforcing the distant blockade of
Germany's ports and harbors was left to
cruisers and destroyers. Many were older
vessels, but even so, they were usually faster
than a submarine and therefore difficult to
approach for a favorable torpedo firing
position. Of course, the very fact that fear of
mines and submarines had compelled the
Royal Navy's battleships to effectively
vacate the Narrow Seas was itself an
indication that the old Mahanian verity,
which held that command of the sea rested
with the biggest ships, had lost much of its
meaning.
In a memorandum December 28, 1914,
Kapitän zur See Zenker of the Naval Staff
set forth the implications for Germany's
naval strategy in general and the role of the
U-boats in particular:
It has been demonstrated that our
submarines have not succeeded now
for a long time in gaining any results
worthy of note, despite the fact that
they have been making cruises for a
long time and have carried them out
with great boldness. In the future
prosecution of the war we will
therefore be able to count neither on
an equality of strength before the
battle due to the use of our light forces
nor on the opponent's changing his
strategy as long as we continue ours
unchanged.
The question was this: if the British were
unlikely to change their strategy, what
changes could Germany make? In
particular, how could the U-boats'
surprisingly capable war-fighting potential
be put to better use?
Stalemate on land and at sea, and the prospect of a long war in which economic and
financial endurance would overshadow
prowess on the battlefield as the arbiter of
war, set the stage for a major and fateful
redefinition of Germany's submarine strategy. Thanks to the invention of the
submarine, commerce warfare, so long
disdained by naval strategists in and out of
uniform as "a delusion, and a most dangerous delusion, "displaced the"decisive battle"
as the centerpiece of naval strategic thinking. The immediate trigger for the threemonth-long debate that followed between
Germany's naval and political leadership
was the British announcement on October
2, 1914, that in order to protect cross-Channel traffic against U-boats the eastern
approach to the Channel had been barred
with a minefield. During the first month afthe declaration of war, 2,764 mines were
planted, and 4,390 were laid during the first
weeks of February the following year.
A Denkschrift by the commander of the Uboat forces, Korvettenkapitän Hermann
Bauer, framed Germany's fateful debate. He
called for immediate retaliation by using the
underwater weapon against British
commerce. His superior officers at the High
Seas Fleet and on the admiralty staff were
sympathetic. The commander of the 2nd
Battle Squadron, Admiral Reinholdt Scheer,
insisted that if this new and powerful
13
weapon was going to be used to full effect,
it must be done "in the way most suited to
its peculiarities," i.e. without warning and
without sparing the crews of the victimized
steamers. But while the navy's uniformed
leadership were naturally focused on the
potential military effectiveness of a shipsinking offensive, the country's political
leadership worried about the possible
political consequences, especially the
reaction of the neutral countries, first and
foremost the United States. Imperial
Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg told the
navy that there were no legal objections to a
commerce campaign but that a decision to
go ahead should await a stronger German
military position on land. In the event,
Germany need not worry how the neutrals
might react. Scheer's comment written after
the war fairly sums up the navy's
frustration: "Enemies on all sides! That was
the situation."
The pressure to find an alternative military
solution to the stalemate on land continued.
In the Reichstag, Bethmann Hollweg came
under strong criticism for hindering the Uboats and being soft on the British. The
press, too, clamored for retaliation against
Britain's "illegal" blockade. On November
21 Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the
"father" of the High Seas Fleet, asked an
American reporter the rhetorical question
whether Germany did not have as much
right as the British opponent to "starve us
out" and retaliate by "by torpedoing any of
their ships and their Allies' ships…"
Bethmann Hollweg reluctantly conceded on
February 1, 1915. The High Sea Fleet's
commander-in-chief, Admiral Von Pohl,
had assured him that the U-boats would
have no difficulty telling enemy from
neutral vessels and that, just to make sure,
very specific the rules of engagement
(ROEs) would be issued. Two days later,
the announcement came that, starting
February 18, all the waters around the
British Isles and the Channel would be a
"war zone" in which all enemy ships would
be destroyed and neutrals would "navigate
at their peril." American protests quickly
compelled the Germans to exempt all
neutral vessels, hospital ships and Belgian
Relief vessels.
The U-boat's restrictive ROEs had
effectively eviscerated the kind of anticommerce campaign originally envisaged.
Strategically, the exemption of neutrals
meant that roughly 30 percent of British
seagoing trade was immune from attack.
Tactically, this translated into a much less
"target-rich environment" for the U-boats.
Also, the requirement that the U-boat
commander make sure of the national
identity of a ship before it could be sunk
made his task much more complicated. On
the one hand, his instructions told the
captain that his "first consideration is the
safety of the submarine." Yet, the ROEs
told him he could carry out his mission only
after he had come to the surface and made a
positive identification of the ship's
nationality at close range, i.e. enemy gun
range. It did not take the British long to
exploit this contradiction.
14
The U-boat order of battle at the start of
what became known as the First Offensive
stood at about 30, a net increase of two
since the start of the war.
U-boat Supply at Sea
As it became increasingly evident [to the
British] that the war would last at least
another year and that the U-boats' activities
would amount to more than a "nuisance,"
"special measures" were being taken. They
were of two kinds - first, immediate
measures using existing technologies and
capabilities to, if not destroy the submerged
enemy, at least limit his freedom of
maneuver and effectiveness. These steps
would hopefully keep the U-boats'
depredations to a tolerable level, while
science and technology would try to find a
long-term solution by way of new kinds of
weapons and, more important, means of
detection. Underlying this overall strategy
was the assumption that the only way to
defeat the U-boat menace was by sinking it.
Research for Professor Breemer's article was made possible
thanks to a grant from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.
When it became evident that Germany's
shipyards had embarked on a massive
submarine building program, there could be
little doubt that the U-boats would be much
more than a tactical nuisance, which, after
some difficulties, could be dealt with by the
navy's professionals. This was a strategic
problem that defied the tried-and-proven
methods of war on the sea. If the submarine
represented a novel form of warfare, then a
systematic defensive effort for the long haul
called for equally novel countermeasures
whose nature lay as yet outside the
experience of the professional naval officer.
[Ed. note: We intend to present a full exposition of the
U-boat boat war, which involved four separate campaigns,
in a future issue. Here we break in Professor Breemer's
original article and pick it up in 1916 when Germany
is moving fatefully to the last phase, unrestricted
submarine warfare.]
15
The overarching aim of the 1916 [second]
campaign had been to choke off Britain's
economic lifeline and force it to the peace
table. Two considerations played a role:
first, retaliation for Britain's illegal
Hungerblockade. Britain's foreign secretary
Grey's announcement before Parliament in
January 1916 of what effectively amounted
to a total economic blockade of Germany
set off a storm of public and military
demands to "unshackle" the U-boats. Next,
the current fleet buildup, which added an
average of six new boats each month, had
opened a window of opportunity to make a
possibly decisive impact on British trade.
The naval staff claimed that if the U-boats
could sink a monthly average of about
630,000 tons of shipping, it would take six
to eight months to bring Britain to its knees.
Bethmann Hollweg was not impressed. His
calculations showed that Britain needed a
monthly import of cereals of only about
15,000-16,000 tons - an amount that called
for only a handful of ships. Furthermore, he
wrote in a memormandum, dated February 29,
1916, the navy seemed to have ignored the
possibility of increased enemy
countermeasures, including - ironically convoying. His cabinet colleague, finance
minister Karl Helfferich joined in, pointing
out that the navy's claim that additional
American financial aid would not help
Britain, presumed that an "iron curtain" of
U-boats could isolate the island from the
rest of the world. Even the navy itself, he
said, counted on a slow and gradual
reduction of enemy tonnage. In the end
though, it was the fear of a final break with
the United States that had again forced the
navy to settle for a less-than-all-out
campaign in 1916.
16
British Countermeasures
As Günter Krause, author of U-Boot Alarm,
put it, the U-boat's second offensive had
met with few improvements in both the
technical or tactical quality of British ASW
measures. On the weapons side, the first
depth charges were issued to the fleet and
the Auxiliary Patrol in January 1916. They
would not prove effective until more than a
year later. Initial production runs were so
small that the ships that were lucky enough
to get any weapons at all were provided
with only two. Even if more ordnance had
been available, the lack of a reliable
means of detection ensured that the
"probability of kill" stayed extremely low.
As long as "targeting" a U-boat depended
mainly on where it was last seen, any
chance of success for a craft carrying only a
couple of depth charges meant that it had to
almost literally be on top of the enemy, i.e.
within 140 feet. It took the introduction of
hydrophones and, more important, larger
load-outs for saturation attacks, for the
depth charge to eventually become the
single most productive U-boat "killer" in
World War I.
On the tactical side of the ASW ledger,
British efforts in 1916 can best be
characterized as more of the same. The
minefields in the Straits of Dover were
strengthened, more nets were added,
additional decoy ships entered service, and
more and more vessels of various types
joined the coastal auxiliary patrols. By the
end of the year, nearly 3,000 vessels were
patrolling the U-boat infested waters. The
patrols were concentrated mainly along the
so-called "approach routes" or "focal
points" of merchant shipping. This was
where the broad oceanic lanes became
narrow funnels and where it was thought the
need to protect shipping was greatest and
the presence of submarines most likely.
There was nothing wrong with this
reasoning but just because the problem was
understood, did not mean it could be solved.
This is evident from one hunt-and-kill
operation in September 1917: For seven
days, two, perhaps three, U-boats sank more
than 30 merchantmen in an area off the
south coast of England that was being
watched over by 49 destroyers, 48 torpedo
boats and 168 armed auxiliaries. During this
time, the underwater enemy was actively
hunted by 13 destroyers and seven Q-ships-no results were achieved.
ASW productivity during the U-boats' 1916
campaign had actually declined compared
with the year before. All things being equal
therefore, the chances of an encounter and,
by inference, a kill, should have been
substantially greater by least twice. One
reason why this was not the case was that
the arming of merchant vessels had made
the U-boats far more cautious in
approaching their intended victim.
Torpedoes were used more frequently; if
not, the boats tended to stand off beyond
gun range and use light signals or warning
shots to force surrender. If the ship
answered with gunfire, the U-boats, which
were now being armed with a mix of two
88mm and 105mm guns, could respond in
kind and stand a fair chance of out-shooting
the merchantman's 12-pounder or 4-inch
cannon. Alternatively, it could submerge,
which an experienced crew could now
accomplish in about one minute.
On the U-boats' side of the ledger,
productivity fell far short of the naval staff's
goal of 630,000 tons per month. Between
March and May, the boats accounted for
215 British vessels with an aggregate
tonnage of almost 480,000. This number
averaged out to about the same monthly loss
rate of the year before, but due to other
pressures on shipping, losses had become
more difficult to absorb. There was a
growing Allied, including French, Italian,
and Russian, demand for shipping; the
supply needs of British forces on the
Western Front had skyrocketed, and the
output of shipyards had declined due in part
to the Royal Navy's needs for the repair and
construction of its vessels. The numbers are
telling. During the first quarter of 1916, 325
British ships were lost from all causes; the
yards produced 93 new vessels. Two
hundred and seventy-one vessels were lost
in the second quarter; the yards completed
113. All in all, the overall quandary for
British shipping in the spring of 1916 can be
summed up as this: how to meet the
growing demand for war-related carrying
capacity with a merchant fleet that was
steadily declining in numbers and tonnage!
Size of Germany's U-boat Fleet
By Year
●
●
●
●
●
4 August, 1914:
1 January, 1916:
1 January, 1917:
1 January, 1918:
11 November, 1918:
28
133
142
134
134
At the time of the armistice, 11 November 1918
229 U-boats were under construction.
17
appointed Maurice Hankey (later Lord
Hankey) as its secretary. At its first
meeting, on December 9, a Shipping
Controller was appointed to give central
direction to what had heretofore been the
work of a mostly ad hoc collection of
agencies that had sprung up during the war
to deal with the emergency of the day.
Changes were made at the Admiralty as
well. Jellicoe was relieved of his command
of the Grand Fleet and made First Sea Lord.
Jellicoe fully agreed with Lloyd George that
defeating the U-boats was the number one
priority. As a first step, he brought in one of
his Grand Fleet subordinate commanders,
Rear-Admiral Alexander Ludovic Duff, to
head up a new Anti-Submarine Division.
The new organization was to coordinate and
stimulate all means of defeating the U-boat
danger, but Jellicoe's memoirs make
patently clear his very traditional and
limited understanding of what exactly
"defeating the U-boats" meant. "Our
object," he wrote,
The third - restricted - U-boat offensive
lasted from October 1916 to January 1917.
During the last quarter of 1916, monthly
sinkings exceeded 300,000 tons for a total
of 963,863 tons and 554 ships. To put this
in perspective, this was close to the tonnage
sunk during the entire preceding year
(1,189,031 tons). Several developments
made these favorable returns possible. One
hundred and eight boats were added to the
fleet in 1916 - nearly five times as many as
the number of boats lost (23). Next, larger
boats - U-boat "cruisers" - permitted more
distant operations, beyond the reach of the
coastal auxiliary patrols. Boats were now
found in the Bay of Biscay from France's
Atlantic coast down to Portugal, in the
Arctic Sea, and even, on one occasion, off
the east coast of the United States.
The rapidly escalating shipping losses in the
winter of 1916-17 brought home to Britain's
political-military leadership for the first
time the fact that it faced a national crisis
that could make or break the war. The
country's supply of wheat was down to 14
weeks. Worse, the Admiralty had
effectively come to the conclusion that it
had no answer to the problem.
The seemingly unending litany of military
setbacks --the Dardanelles fiasco, the failed
Somme offensive, the disappointing
outcome of Jutland, and now the U-boat
crisis all contributed to the fall of the
Asquith cabinet in December. One of the
first decisions of the new prime minister,
David Lloyd George, was to institute an
inner "War Cabinet," which would
hopefully streamline the country's unwieldy
political-military decision-making process.
With himself at the head, Lloyd George
. . .was to destroy submarines at a
greater rate than the output of the
German shipyards. This was the surest
way of counteracting their activities. It
was mainly for the purpose of attack
on the submarines that I formed the
Anti-Submarine Division of the Naval
Staff.
18
Even as war was still being fought
according to the Prize Regulations, the
steadily escalating toll that was being
exacted portended worse to come. In the
words of one German historian, the threat
of an unrestricted onslaught hung over the
British isles like the "sword of Damocles."
"The Most Tremendous Undertaking"
The decision to cut the thin thread that held
the sword was made on January 9, 1917 at a
crown council held at the kaiser's
residence in Pless, Silesia. February 1 was
set as the date for opening the campaign.
All shipping, enemy and neutral, including
passenger ships, would be liable to attack
without warning. Over 100 U-boats stood
poised to launch what Scheer labeled, "The
most tremendous undertaking that the worldwar brought in its long train."
The aim was no less than to compel Britain
to sue for peace within five to six months.
The Germans had done their homework
which had produced this estimate. A team
of civilian economic, financial and maritime
experts, commissioned by the naval staff,
had calculated that, if the U-boats could
sink 600,000 tons of shipping each month,
and if 40 percent of neutral shipping could
be frightened into staying in port, five
months would suffice to reduce the amount
of shipping for Britain's supply needs by 39
percent. This, the group predicted, would
amount to an "unacceptable loss." As
matters turned out, the basic statistics were
sound. Accurate also was the calculation
that the United States would likely join
Germany's enemies, but that it would take
18 months for its vast resources to be fully
mobilized - presumably far too late to
rescue the British. The fatal flaws in the
calculations were certain underlying premises
and assumptions, for example, the belief that
the British "political system" was incapable of
imposing onerous food rationing.
The naval leadership, too, had its
assumptions. Holtzendorff was convinced
that, if his U-boats could dispatch 300,000
19
to 400,000 tons of shipping to the bottom of
the sea each month despite the Prize
Regulations, it should manage 600,000 tons
without those restrictions. At the base of the
navy chief of staff's confidence was the
belief that increased U-boat losses due to
improved enemy countermeasures would be
more than offset by new additions. Implicit
in this estimate was the assumption that
enemy defensive improvements would be
slow and evolutionary - more ships, more
mines, etc. No thought seems to have been
given to the possibility of a British
"breakthrough" solution that might,
somehow, defeat the 600,000 tons-permonth goal. The German navy's propaganda
had painted the U-boat as an unbeatable,
victorious "wonder weapon;" a British
countermiracle within the next six months
was unimaginable.
Holtzendorff's expectations seemed well
founded in the first few months of the
unrestricted campaign. In February,
worldwide shipping losses climbed to about
500,000 tons; in March to some 540,000;
and in April, the Allies' worst - over
840,000 tons disappeared. This averaged to
just about the 600,000 tons per month the
German navy had calculated would be
necessary bring Britain to its knees. Since
the output of British shipyards was far less
than the losses, the only way for the country
to make ends meet was to impose further
import restrictions. In February, cuts
amounting to 500,000 tons a month in commodities ranging from luxury items, such
as coffee and silk clothing, to basic foods
and raw factory materials, was announced
The supply of basic foodstuffs at this time
was estimated to last six weeks at best.
Part II of Jan S. Breemer's article begins on page 29.
Meet Our New President: Dana Lombardy
By Diane B. Rooney, Marketing Director, The Great War Society
Dana Lombardy was elected the third president of The Great
War Society in August 2008, succeeding Sal Compagno, who
became President Emeritus and head of the San Francisco area
East Bay Chapter. In this conversation, Dana introduces himself to members, prospective members, and the larger Great
War community and discusses his wide-ranging historical
interests and the group's plans for expanding the Society and
preparing for the Great War's Centennial.
Since 1972, Dana has worked as a researcher, consultant,
cartographer, designer, editor, speaker and writer on more
than 100 military history projects. He has appeared as an on-camera expert in multiple episodes of the History Channel series "Tales of the Gun" and numerous other television
documentaries.
Society President Dana Lombardy
THE GREAT WAR SOCIETY
MISSION STATEMENT
Since 1986, the purposes of The Great War Society
have been to study all aspects of World War I and to
promote a greater understanding of this catastrophic
conflict and its profound and lasting effects on
subsequent generations. To achieve these goals, the
organization focuses on three main activities that
involve the work of volunteers, charitable
contributions, and sponsorships.
EDUCATION through collection and dissemination
of information via publications, lectures and seminars.
We increase awareness of the Great War through our
web site
www.the-great-war-society.org
and through our quarterly publication called
Relevance, and we have held fifteen major seminars
in the U.S. that often featured speakers from around
the world.
PRESERVATION of records, artifacts and
monuments. We work closely with such organizations
as the National World War One Museum in Kansas
City, the U.S. Oise-Aisne Cemetery in France, and
others.
TRANSLATION of non-English materials &
TRANSCRIPTION of letters and diaries. We promote
and make available translations and transcriptions
prepared by our members, scholars and students to
support a broader understanding of the Great War.
Dana narrated three audio programs on London
available as podcasts on the web, sponsored by
VisitBritain.com, BritishHeritage.com and
HistoryNet. His most recent books include
Historic Photos of Los Angeles, Historic Photos
of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and two books on
Civil War artist Keith Rocco. Dana was the
founder and organizer of Celebrate History, a
unique event that brought together people
interested in all periods of history for lectures,
panels, displays, demonstrations, and reenactments. He is also a frequent presenter at
historical and strategic gaming conventions
including GenCon, Historicon, and KublaCon.
Dana and his wife, Anne Merritt, who also loves
history, reside in Oakland, CA in a spacious
live/work space that serves as home, office, and
warehouse. Our interview:
DR: Dana, your interests in history are expansive in time.
Where and how does the Great War fit into these
interests?
20
DL: I first became aware of The Great War Society in
1998, through the first Celebrate History. My major
interests prior to that were the Civil War, World War II,
and the Napoleonic era. I was excited to join TGWS
because World War I had such a gigantic impact on
events both then and subsequently, down through World
War II and our own day.
comprehensive, especially with a focus on the personal
stories of the last few veterans. I believe this interest will
continue to build in the coming years. It did so for the
Civil War centennial in 1961 through 1965, and interest
and involvement in the Civil War has remained strong in
the forty years since then.
DR: What are the greatest challenges facing the TGWS?
DR: How is The Great War Society doing these days?
DL: There are millions of people interested in history
who don't know that the organization exists. One of my
most important jobs is to make them aware of TGWS,
that we have an exciting story to tell and preserve, and
that they can help.
DL: I was honored when the Board asked me if I was
interested in helping the Society as its new President. I
saw it as a chance to infuse the organization with some
of the ideas I had developed at Celebrate History and
with other organizations.
Everyone interested in the Great War can contribute by
joining or renewing their membership, even if they are
unable to attend a local meeting or a national seminar.
We want their opinions and their participation in
deciding how their membership money will be used to
preserve, honor, and respect the past, and what projects
we support. It all starts with joining.
It seems these days every organization struggles to
maintain itself, let alone grow. We're going through a
major reassessment and reinvigoration of what we want
to be. To help TGWS thrive, we're currently
implementing several changes, including a new, focused
mission statement (see p. 20), a totally new website that
lets people join or renew online, and a simplified dues
structure. We've asked Michael Hanlon to become editor
of Relevance, to return that publication to its former
glory and continue to improve our communications
programs.
We've started to reach out to a wide range of related
organizations. These include the Western Front
Association (USA branch), the League of World War I
Aviation Historians, the Society for Military History,
and the National World War I Museum, among others.
There is a vast network of contacts out there to work
with and build upon.
We've begun supporting the National World War I
Museum in Kansas City, through financial contributions
and by holding our Seminar there. We have other
exciting projects in the works that we'll be announcing
over the next few issues of Relevance.
DR: Are there other projects related to our
communications, our journal and website?
DL: Yes, in addition to the new website, we've expanded
Relevance and made it available in traditional print
format and digitally as well. These options are worked
into the pricing of the membership packages. I think this
makes better use of members' funds.
DR: So it sounds like TGWS wants to reach out and
engage new and more diverse groups and get them
involved?
DL: Yes, we want to reach a more diverse membership.
This could include all types of gamers, genealogists, reenactors, recent veterans and active military,
teachers/professors, and just thoughtful people in general
who want to deepen their understanding of, for example,
the current map of the Middle East or how the women's
suffrage movement came about.
DR: Are there other new ideas the Society is
considering?
DR: With the approaching centennial of the war's start,
what is TGWS doing to remember and honor it?
DL: We've started our planning for 2014-2019. We aim
to be the leading source for public and media
information on the Great War as we move toward the
centennial. I noticed that U.S. and international coverage
of the 90th anniversary this month was quite
21
DL: Yes, one is returning to a joint Seminar with the
WFA-USA. Their new president, Doran Cart, is Curator
of the National World War I Museum. They've invited
us to jointly sponsor a Seminar at the Museum in
September 2009. This combination helps both
organizations as well as raises the profile of the
Museum. Another is looking at shorter, newsletter-type
communications that would come out between the
quarterly issues of Relevance, and exploring all the new
media from blogs to podcasts to social networking
communities. The WFA-USA is already doing some of
that.
DR: From 1996 to 2000, you published Napoleon
Journal, an international publication devoted to the
study of the wars of the French Revolution and Age of
Napoleon. You also published Conflict magazine in the
1970s. What things did you learn about marketing
history and engaging people that are relevant to TGWS?
DL: Among books I would have to mention Margaret
Macmillan's Paris 1919, Thomas Fleming's Illusion of
Victory, and G .J. Meyer's A World Undone: The Story
of the Great War. Among films, All Quiet on the
Western Front, after all these years, in both versions, is
still incredibly moving.
DL: That there are millions of people who love history.
Often their focus is on their family or a particular period,
but they respond enthusiastically to much more when
there's a good story that's well presented. We need to
figure out how to engage them with our best stories, well
told.
DR: Can you sum up your interest in history and its
importance?
DL: What I said in my two Historic Photographs books
is still true. For me, history has always been about the
people and their stories that made the world we know. I
am also interested in how things work, why people made
certain decisions, and how different choices could have
led to possible alternatives. We are the result of history,
and we live with and are making history every day. The
current conflicts in the Middle East are just the most
striking example of living with the consequences of the
Great War.
DR: Dana, you've designed more than a dozen
war games and contributed to at least two dozen more.
Streets of Stalingrad won an Origins Award in 1980.
You're a frequent presenter at a range of gaming
conventions and know that market. How can TGWS
build bridges to the gaming community?
DL: Well, as a game designer, I analyze history to
identify how to present it in a successful game. That's
essentially what real world analysts do in today's crises.
Games present information in a totally new way. Not
just the names, dates, and numbers, but the story and
why it's important. Gamers will play in any period from
ancient through fantasy futures, because for them the
exciting part is the chance to be the decision maker, to
consider the impact of changed history, and to challenge
themselves. It's completely involving and engaging. I've
got some ideas about how we can do that for World War I.
DR: You're also an Associate Editor at Armchair
General Online. What can we learn from and how can
we work effectively with websites that provide online and
printed materials as well as community and social
networking?
DL: The Internet is a revolution that has changed
everything we do and how we do it in the last ten years.
The bad news is that anyone who can type thinks they
can be an instant expert. But the good news is that an
incredible amount of information from archives and
libraries is now accessible on the web. Also, in terms of
getting our message out there, we can reach thousands of
people around the world electronically, in engaging,
interactive formats, for little cost. Armchair General's
experience with that model is a great example for us to
follow.
DR: Do you have any favorite WWI books and films?
22
Pershing Square, Washington D.C., Fall 2008
Also, I just returned from Washington, D.C., where I had
the opportunity to visit Pershing Square, with its statue
of the general and marble wall memorializing the
American Expeditionary Force. This is the closest thing
to an American World War I monument, but because it's
not located at or near the Mall where the other
monuments are located, it doesn't get as much attention
and is in need of restoration. I see it as my job, my duty,
to help preserve and promote this monument so neither
the people who served in the Great War nor their cause
are forgotten.
DR: Any final words?
DL: I urge everyone who loves history, who especially
want to preserve World War I history, to help us by
renewing their membership or joining TGWS for the
first time. Our new vision, our new mission, and our new
start is only possible with their support.
For nearly a decade, the Great War Society has been building a huge website--actually a network of sites--to further
interest and education in the events of 1914-1918. It has received many awards and citations as "Best" in subject over
the years. Starting with this issue of Relevance we are going to share some of the best and most interesting articles we
provide on the Internet with you readers. We have tried, at least when we started out, to cover aspects of the war that
seemed to be neglected. The first of these was our feature on the AEF, the Doughboy Center, which has won many of
the honors mentioned above. We later added features on the Italian Front, the Near East, France during the war, and the
legends and traditions of the conflict. We also provide an extensive collection of contributions from our members and a
comprehensive list of books and films for students of the war, but there is even more. We have formed "alliances" with
some of the most outstanding websites existing. These include: the most famous of them all, Trenches on the Web, the
the creation of the late Mike Iavarone, who was a member of the Great War Society; Great War in a Different Light,
the greatest collection of images from the war possibly ever assembled from our friend Tony Langley of Antwerp, and
Links Central, the largest available collection of World War I Internet click-on links, which I produce for our sister
organization, the Western Front Association, U.S. Branch. Our website is being redesigned at this time, but our content
is fully accessible. The graphic below will give you the flavor of what is available through our "Learning and Research
Center" at our new home page:
www.the-great-war-society.org
In this issue of Relevance, we present features from our Members' Contribution site and our treatment of the Italian
Front, La Grande Guerra. We have tried to reflect the look of each of the uniquely designed sections. Please visit our
website, as these pages are but representative of thousands of items you can examine online.
MH
23
From the Great War Society's Website
STOP
GORIZIA
XXXVI
The city of Gorizia lies on the River Isonzo at the foot of the Julian Alps and
has ancient origins. It was the capital city of a province of the AustroHungarian Empire and flourished until the outbreak of the First World War,
which reduced it to rubble. It was captured by troops of Italian army
in August 1916, and became part of Italy postwar. Occupied by Slovene
partisans at the end of WWII, the city was returned to Italian rule in 1947.
The Eastern suburbs, the part now called Nova Gorizia, was ceded to Yugoslavia and today lies in Slovenia.
Surrounding Area from Central Gorizia
War correspondent E. Alexander Powell described Gorizia and the surrounding area:
At the northern end of the Carso, in an angle formed by the
junction of the Wippach and the Isonzo, the snowy towers and
black-brown roofs of Gorizia rise above the foliage of its famous
gardens. The town, which resembles Homburg or Baden-Baden
and was a popular Austrian resort before the war, lies in the
valley of the Wippach (Vippacco the Italians call it), which
24
separates the Carso from the southernmost spurs of the Julian
Alps. Down this valley runs the railway leading to Trieste,
Laibach, and Vienna. It will be seen, therefore, that Gorizia is
really the gateway to Trieste, and a place of immense strategic
importance. On the slopes of the Carso, four or five miles to the
southwest of the town, rises the enormously strong position of
Monte San Michele, and a few miles farther down the Isonzo, the
fortified hill-town of Sagrado. On the other side of the river,
almost opposite Gorizia, are the equally strong positions of
Podgora and Monte Sabotino. Their steep slopes were slashed
with Austrian trenches and abristle with guns which
commanded the roads leading to the river, the bridge-heads, and
the town. To take Gorizia until these positions had been
captured was obviously out of the question. Here, as
elsewhere, Austria held the upper ground. In a memorandum
issued by the Austrian General Staff to its officers at the
beginning of the operations before Gorizia, the tremendous
advantage of the Austrian position was made quite clear: "We
have to retain possession of a terrain fortified by Nature. In front
of us a great watercourse; behind us a ridge from which we can
shoot as from a ten-story building."
Gorizia Castle
25
The center of the old town is dominated by the castle, built sometime
after 1000 AD by the Counts of Gorizia on the site of a prehistoric
"Castelliere" and where later a Roman lookout tower was added. In
Slovene "Gorica" means "small mountain" referring to the castle hill. The
castle today holds a museum of history and art as well as a First World
War Museum.
In 1500 Gorizia came into the possession of the Hapsburg monarchy to
whose fortunes and misfortunes it remained tied, except for a brief period
of the Venetian domination and Napoleonic occupation, until the end of
World War I, when it became Italian.
During the Great War, Gorizia was a strategic objective of the Italian
Army and was the object of many assaults before it was finally captured
on August 8, 1916. The nearby Carso Plateau was the site of tens of
thousands of deaths for the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies. The city
was abandoned by the Italians during the Battle of Caporetto and retaken
late in 1918 at the time of the Armistice.
Italian Troops Entering the City
Today Gorizia is an industrial, commercial, transport, and tourist center.
Manufactures include textiles, leather goods, processed food, and
machines.
Visit www.worldwar1.com/itafront/ to read our articles on the Italian
Front of World War I, including our Virtual Tour of the Front, which is still
under development.
26
From The Great War Society Members' Contributions Website
My Father, John Giles Farquhar
of
25 Squadron, RAF
By John W. (Jack) Farquhar, M.D.
My father, John Giles Farquhar, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on July 13, 1897
and raised there. He joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and by 1918 had earned a lieutenant's commission and his pilot's wings with the RAF. He was assigned to
25 Squadron, flying a DH-9 on bombing and reconnaisance missions. He was shot
down once and survived, but his observer was killed.
27
Dad in His Trench Coat with His DH-9 (Other Men in Photo Not Identified)
After the war, he returned home, renewed his athletic career and earned recognition as one of the finest hockey goalies of his era. His subsequent career also
involved sports, both coaching and operating sporting businesses. His interests
brought the family to America, first to the University of Wisconsin, then Passdena,
California. He passed away in 1974.
My uncle Charles also served in the
Canadian Army. He was four years older
than my father and chose to stay in
England after the war, where he became
an exporter of Scotch whiskey.
Charles Malcolm Farquhar,
Quartermaster Corps, C.E.F.
Great War Society member Dr. Jack
Farquhar is a Professor Emeritus at the
Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto,
California. All members of the Society
are entitled to their own web page for
presenting any topic related to the war.
Visit:
www.worldwar1.com/tgwscontr/
to see what other members have presented.
28
Part Two: The Convoy System
The huge British anti-submarine defensive
effort so far was clearly a shambles. Writing
in his diary on February 8, 1917, Sir Maurice
Hankey admitted that it looked like our
"our military effort would so far exhaust us
that we cannot maintain our sea power and
our economic position." He consoled himself that his country seemed at least to be
sinking "a good many submarines." He was
wrong. In February, the Germans lost five
U-boats, four of which were due to enemy
action. In March and April, another four
boats fell victim to mines and other hostile
causes. In other words, 1,104 ships were
sunk at the cost of nine attackers!
The Royal Navy's mainstay strategic
scheme so far for giving in- and outbound
shipping at least a modicum of protection
was rapidly unraveling. Involved here was
Presented by Permission of Jan S. Breemer
29
the so-called "approach areas" strategy. This
protective system had been introduced off
the south coast of Ireland in the summer of
1915, but had gradually expanded to three
"great cones of approach" in which oceanic
shipping converged on Britain's ports. The
scheme called for inbound shipping to be
routed along - very thinly patrolled approach routes until they arrived in Home
Waters and could benefit from the more
heavily patrolled inshore routes. Outbound
shipping followed the reverse procedure.
The system worked reasonably well while
the U-boats operated relatively near shore; it
fell apart, when the larger boats sought their
prey some 200 nautical miles further west
where patrol coverage was thin or nonexistent and the approach routes converged
towards the protected inshore lanes. These
so-called "danger areas" of some 10,000 to
All Rights Reserved by the Author
Admiralty - Henderson in the AntiSubmarine Division, DeWar in the
Operations Division. It is not clear from the
evidence which of the two took the
initiative, the problem being, in part, that
the accounts of their experience are
curiously similar. In any event, between the
two, it was discovered that (a) the attrition
to British shipping was far greater than the
public statistics suggested and (b) the actual
number of ocean-going ships arriving at and
sailing from British ports was much smaller
than was advertised, making the provision
of convoy escorts a much more manageable
undertaking than had been claimed by the
Admiralty.
15,000 square miles quickly became death
traps from which 25 out of every 100
steamers that left Britain in the spring of
1917 failed to return. As the Minister of
Shipping wrote after the war, they had
become the "graveyard of British shipping."
Even the Admiralty was compelled to admit
at the end of March that, despite all efforts,
the attack had outstripped the defense, with
no solution in sight. The implication was
obvious: ". . .the end of the war could be
fixed with arithmetical precision at no very
distant date."
Insurgents in the Admiralty
One of Winston Churchill's most
memorable phrases of World War II pays
tribute to the young men who won the
Battle of Britain and thereby arguably kept
the country from German invasion. "Never
in the field of human conflict," the Prime
Minister said on August 20, 1940, "was so
much owed by so many to so few." With
only a slight exaggeration, the same might
be said of two relatively junior Royal Navy
officers who bucked the "system" to
catalyze the convoy revolution, which halted
the slide to seemingly inevitable defeat. Their
names have become footnotes at best in
most histories of the U-boat campaign, but
had it not been for their willingness to
question - at considerable risk to their
careers - the prevailing assumptions and
"facts" about the conduct of the anti-U-boat
war, the actual solution to the U-boat
problem, i.e. the convoy system, might
never have been adopted. The two were
Commander (later Admiral Sir) Reginald
Henderson and Captain (later Vice Admiral)
Kenneth G. B. DeWar. Both worked in the
30
Both officers reportedly turned to the newly
created Ministry of Shipping, when they
found that the Admiralty itself could not
provide reliable statistics about the comings
and goings of overseas shipping. Henderson
supposedly went looking in connection with
his responsibility for organizing the
"controlled" sailings of the cross-Channel
coal trade to France. Practically speaking,
these were convoys, but the Admiralty was
evidently not quite ready to use that name.
DeWar writes he needed better statistics in
order to prepare the Admiralty's Weekly
Appreciation of the U-boat war. According
to his account, the Admiralty's Trade
Division could tell him only the number and
tonnage of ships sunk; the Customs Returns
were the source for the tabulation of weekly
arrivals and sailings. With the help of
Norman Leslie of the Ministry of Shipping,
it did not take long for the two officers to
realize that the customs numbers grossly
exaggerated the actual number of vessels
that called on British ports. "These figures,"
DeWar wrote later, "had been started as
propaganda for the public. . ." For example,
the report of 1,800 cross-Channel passages
each month involved only about 200
vessels. When DeWar's next Weekly
Appreciation showed that the weekly
arrivals and departures of ocean-going ships
amounted to only 200, DeWar was met with
two reactions. First, there was disbelief; the
First Lord - the Admiralty's political head had become so accustomed to hearing the
inflated Customs Returns, he thought
DeWar must be using daily figures. The
second response was bureaucratic. DeWar,
according to his own account, had
transgressed the rules of the Admiralty,
when he had contacted another ministerial
department without having sought and
received proper clearance to do so.
either desirable or feasible. As already
hinted at in DeWar's account, the Admiralty
itself was not a likely place to give
Henderson's numbers a warm welcome,
especially their implication that convoying
might be a practical proposition after all.
Revealing the "real" numbers impugned the
"High Admirals'" common sense; if the
numbers further strengthened the case for
convoying, then the admirals' strategic
wisdom was in question. Knowing this,
Henderson circumvented the formal chain
of command and contacted the political
leadership directly. The indications are he
chose Hankey, Lloyd George's éminence
grise, as his point of contact. Hankey
himself does not mention any meeting in his
autobiography, but his biographer, Stephen
Roskill, believes this to be almost certainly
the case. There is a possibility also that,
perhaps at Hankey's instigation, Henderson
went to see Lloyd George directly. The
prime minister's autobiography does not
make specific mention of such a meeting,
but the author makes it clear that he met
with a number of junior officers who were
critical of their superiors' ASW schemes
and refusal to consider the convoy option
seriously. Jellicoe and also his biographer,
Admiral Bacon, mention Lloyd George's
penchant to seek out the opinions of junior
officers. Not surprisingly, neither man was
pleased. "(T)here were apparently certain
junior officers who went to, and were
received by, Mr. Lloyd George, and who
formulated to him ideas for dealing with the
submarine menace," Jellicoe wrote.
"Personally," he went on, "I had never heard
of their proposals," and in any case, it was
"strange that they did not ask to see me nor
Again, the story of Henderson's role is very
similar. Henderson, according to Lloyd
George's autobiography, discovered the
"fateful error in accountantship which
nearly lost us the War. . ." Henderson
belonged to the "convoy lobby" of young
officers within the Admiralty; the revealing
statistics were, in a sense, his last best
chance to undermine the organization's
persistent refusal to consider the convoys as
31
biographer speculates that perhaps this
"brainwave" was triggered by a meeting with
Henderson. The navy's leadership was not
yet ready to be convinced, however. Only
one month ago, Jellicoe had told the War
Cabinet that he wanted more decoy ships
because they were "the most effective
method of dealing with submarines." By
contrast, merchant ships could not sail in
formation, not enough destroyers were
available for escorts, a convoy would have
to sail at the speed of the slowest vessel, and
a group of ships presented a much bigger
and more vulnerable target than a vessel
traveling alone. The admirals did agree to
carefully monitor the results of ongoing trial
convoys to France and Norway. Although
he had achieved much less than he wanted,
Lloyd George was not quite ready yet to
bring matters to a head.
some other officer in authority." Bacon was
dismissive of "some junior officers and
laymen" who, in his words, "egged on" the
prime minister to force the immediate
adoption of the convoy. Fortunately,
Jellicoe "withstood Mr. Lloyd George's
visionary ideas until America entered the
war."
The admirals' unhappiness is undertandable. The Junior officers had clearly
violated the chain of command; their
advocacy outside the Admiralty Board
Room of a strategy that was clearly at odds
with the Admiralty's agreed strategy,
smacked of insubordination, if not outright
sabotage. The officers' most grievous sin,
though, was that by confiding in the
country's political leadership, they had
breached the navy's long and jealouslyguarded immunity from civilian
interference.
The reasons given why convoying was
neither feasible nor desirable can be
summarized as follows. To begin with, it
was feared that ships sailing closely
The Admirals Must Account
together and emitting a massive plume of
smoke would increase, not decrease, the
likelihood of their being spotted by a
prowling U-boat. It was easy to visualize
The Henderson/DeWar numbers ended
Jellicoe's "honeymoon" with Lloyd George;
what would happen next: while the attacker
the Admiralty's monopoly on decisionpicked off its targets at leisure, the surviving
ships would panic, lose formation, and
making was finis. It began on February 13,
when the prime minister invited Carson,
collide in their haste to flee the killing
Jellicoe and his ASW chief, Admiral Duff,
ground. Even if not under attack, there was
to 10 Downing Street. Hankey also attended.
much doubt among both naval and merchant
On the agenda was a memorandum prepared
marine officers whether a group of ships
by Hankey, advocating the adoption of convoy- could sail a tightly controlled zigzag course;
ing at the earliest possible date. Hankey has
more ships might be lost as the result of
described his proposal as the result of "a
collisions than the enemy. In his memoirs,
brainwave on the subject of anti-submarine
Jellicoe acknowledges that this concern
warfare" he had a few days earlier. His
turned out to be "somewhat exaggerated"
32
WWI Convoy Showing Spacing Between Ships, Escort in Foreground
but that it was based, at the time, on his
consultations with "many" merchant
shipmasters. Jellicoe may have had any
number of informal conversations, but the
record reports only one official discussion.
It took place on February 23, 1917. Ten ship
masters were invited - nine attended.
Jellicoe found that all nine much preferred
to sail alone rather than in company. They
"were quite emphatic" in their opinion, he
wrote, that it would be impossible for eight
ships, sailing in two columns and with
speeds differing by, say, two knots, to keep
station 2½ cables (about 500 yards) apart.
Jellicoe's suggested station-keeping criteria
are interesting. They were evidently not
based on any "field test," but borrowed
instead from the Grand Fleet. When sailing
in cruising formation, the Grand Fleet's
battleships were typically organized into
33
divisions of four dreadnoughts each,
stationed 2½ cables apart. The four-ship
divisions, like Jellicoe's suggested convoy,
sailed in columns, which themselves were
eight cables, or 1,600 yards, apart. Keeping
exact station could be difficult even for
practiced navy crews. In the event of
difficulties due to, say, weather or high
speed, standing instructions called for ships
to increase the distance between them. With
this background in mind, the ship masters'
negative reaction to Jellicoe's rather
stringent convoy requirements is not very
surprising. Perhaps more surprising is that
Jellicoe apparently did not take a leaf from
the Admiralty's own instructions and ask
whether station-keeping would be feasible if
spacing between ships was, say, doubled to
five cables. Moreover, a skeptic could have
pointed out that the key reason for the close
spacing of the war fleet was not relevant for
a grouping of merchant vessels. Tight
station keeping was necessary to minimize
the time the battle fleet needed to make the
evolution from cruising to battle formation.
There was no such need for a merchant
convoy. But then perhaps Jellicoe was not
looking for an answer that might "prove"
the convoy. Interestingly, when the convoy
system was instituted, the typical spacing
for ships sailing in column was 1,000 yards,
and the spacing between columns as much
as 2,000 yards.
battleships with torpedoes and defend their
own battleships against enemy torpedo
destroyers; the second was designed to
protect.
The Admiralty's excessive - as it turned out estimate of the number of escorts needed to
protect a convoy may also have its roots
Grand Fleet practice. Admiralty opinion at
the time had it that the escorting forces
would have to be twice as numerous as the
vessels being escorted. As in the case of the
station keeping issue, this was evidently an
à priori opinion, which rested on neither
practical experience with convoy screening,
nor any form of careful analysis. Instead,
the Grand Fleet's order of battle of capital
ships and screening forces of light cruisers
and destroyers seems to have been used as
the 2:1 benchmark.
When the convoys set sail in 1917, the
continued shortage of escort forces
compelled much "thinner" screens than
were thought necessary. It turned out,
though, that even a small number or
relatively poorly armed vessels oftentimes
sufficed to deter all but the most intrepid Uboat commanders. On paper, and depending
on its size, a convoy was supposed to be
accompanied by at least six destroyers;
many had, however, only one escort on
much of their route. Also, contrary to what
seems common sense, there is no direct
relationship between the number of ships in
the convoy and the number of escorts.
Larger convoys required more escorts, but a
much more important factor than numbers
of ships per se, is the size of the convoy's
defensive perimeter. Adding ships expanded
the perimeter, but only fractionally so. It has
been learned in fact - though only after
analysis many years after the war - that the
larger the convoy the safer the ship.
If the Grand Fleet "model" for escort
requirements formed indeed the basis for
the Admiralty's estimate of how many ships
would be needed to protect convoys, the
consequences were unfortunate. Not enough
destroyers was constantly cited as a key
reason why convoying, however desirable it
might be on other grounds (which, in the
eyes of most admirals, it was not) was not
feasible. Evidently no one suggested that a
destroyer screen for the battle fleet served
an entirely different purpose than a convoy's
- the first was there to attack the enemy's
34
Shipping interests feared that delays and
port congestion - and therefore lowered
earning power - would be one of convoy's
unavoidable consequences. Delays would
come in any number of ways: many vessels
would have to make an intermediate voyage
from their port of loading to a port of
concentration; there, they would have to
wait while the convoy was being collected;
next, the faster ships would have to reduce
their speed to that of the slowest in the
convoy; and, finally, there would be more
delays, when the ships arrived in their ports
afterward, when the raw statistics were
finally taken in hand and evaluated with the
help of the sophisticated tools of analysis
that have collectively become known as
"operational (or operations) analysis." But
in April 1917, the time for prevarication and
worry over the real and perceived risks of
convoying was rapidly running out. The
reality was that, even if convoying suffered
from all the disadvantages the "High
Admirals" claimed, it could produce no
worse results than were being obtained by
current methods. The problem was - at least
according to Lloyd George - that the
Admiralty could not admit to the possibility
of a solution that fell outside its professional
expertise:
of discharge where facilities were not
designed to handle the "pulse arrivals" of
large groups of ships. An added worry from
the point of view of the authorities
concerned the effect of the delays on the
delivery rate of goods. They were all
reasonable and, to a degree, justified
arguments. From the perspective of the
overall war effort though, they turned out
manageable. Even Jellicoe, hardly an
optimist, acknowledged that the feared "turn
round" problem associated with the sudden
arrival of large numbers of ships, was
eventually "enormously decreased." The
convoy system did adversely affect delivery
rates. No detailed calculations for World
War I are available, but the numbers for
World War II are presumably representative. It was found that, depending on the
route, delivery rates declined by 10 to 14
percent. This must be compared, however,
with the cumulative effect on delivery rates
of the much higher ship losses among
"independents," which was far more serious,
at least during World War II.
They were like doctors who, whilst
they are unable to arrest the ravages
of a disease which gradually
weakening the resistance of the patient
despite all their efforts, are suddenly
confronted with a new, unexpected and
grave complication. They go about
with gloomy mien and despondent
hearts. Their reports are full of
despair. It is clear that they think the
case is now hopeless. All the same,
their only advice is to persist in the
application of the same treatment. Any
other suggestion is vetoed. Their
professional honour is involved in not
accepting remedies which they have
already refused to consider. What
makes it difficult to persuade them to
try an obvious cure is that it had been
urged upon them by civilians and
turned down by the experts with scorn
and derision.
Many of the war-winning advantages of the
convoy system would only became evident
after it had been put into practice. Some
would only be realized many years
35
"We Run a Great Risk of Losing the War"
The day (April 10, 1917) that Sims made
"the all-important discovery. . .that Britain
did not control the seas" (emphasis in the
original), losses at sea were relatively light.
Three ships were torpedoed, but only two
sank. At this point though, no one among
Britain's political and military leadership
questioned that the country was close to
economic and military-strategic disaster. In
a strong "minute sheet," dated March 29,
Hankey urged "the most drastic measures,"
including "switch shipping from moving
ammunition to bringing wheat from the
United States and Canada." He effectively
called for scaling back the war effort to
prevent a national food crisis. The gravity of
the food crisis became painfully evident in
the War Cabinet's decision, two days
afterward, to extend rationing to the
trenches - the soldiers would have one
potato-less day and fewer potatoes the other
six days. The hemorrhage of Allied and
neutral trading fleets meanwhile continued
to outpace the completion of replacement
shipping and the turnaround time for ships
brought in for repair. Chances were that the
one British ship that managed to escape
destruction on the day of Sims's visit, had
either been so damaged it had to be written
36
off or, if not, would not go back to sea for
another five months. The fact is that for
every five ships sunk worldwide, a sixth
was either damaged beyond repair, or would
take an average of four months to repair and
another month to return to service. Thus,
during the first half of 1917, 770,000 tons of
shipping were damaged, about 50 percent of
which could be considered as permanently
lost. According to another report, the 50
percent that was repairable required an
average repair time of four months per ship,
and five months before the ship was back in
service. In other words, if the Germans were
correct in their calculation that it would take
five to six months to bring Britain to its
knees, then damaging a ship had about the
same effect as sinking it!
The three weeks after the Jellicoe-Sims
meeting proved to be decisive in setting in
motion the strategic solution that ultimately
defeated the U-boat. When he met with
Sims, Jellicoe still gave the Admiralty's
stock answer when it came to convoys - not
enough destroyers, problems with stationkeeping, etc. But in the undramatic words of
World War One author of Seaborne Trade,
Ernest Fayle, the "unprecedented losses
suffered during the last fortnight of April,
especially in the approach areas, greatly
strengthened the hands of those who
advocated the general introduction of the
convoy system. . ." Lloyd George's hands
were strengthened in particular when he
found, while visiting the Grand Fleet on
April 13, that its commander, Admiral
Beatty, strongly supported convoying. He
had also learned that Sims backed the idea.
The war cabinet, including Jellicoe, met
again on April 23. The First Sea Lord gave
a bleak report on "The Submarine and Food
Supply." Again, the Admiralty could offer
no solutions other than to build up the
country's food supply. He also proposed the
construction of lots of small cargo ships
which "would be more immune from
attack," as well as a handful of very large,
"unsinkable," vessels. Lloyd George
reminded Jellicoe that both Beatty and Sims
favored the convoy option. The message
must have been clear: the convoy idea was
no longer just the will-o'-the wisp idea of a
handful of civilians and junior naval
officers; it now had the backing of Britain's
most senior fleet commander as well as the
senior naval representative of Britain's new
ally. Jellicoe agreed to "make a further
report on the matter," but Lloyd George was
evidently less than convinced that this
would not be another stalling tactic. His
assessment, as reported in his autobiography, was that it "was clear that the
Admiralty did not intend to take any
effective steps in the direction of
convoying." Two days later, on April 25, he
received War Cabinet approval to visit the
Admiralty on April 30 in order to, in his
own words, "take peremptory action on the
question of convoys."
The Admiralty knew what was coming.
Before tabling the matter before the War
Cabinet, Lloyd George had informed the
First Lord, Edward Carson, of his plan.
Matters must have been rather hectic during
the next few days. On April 26, the head of
Admiralty's Anti-Submarine Division,
Admiral Duff, gave Jellicoe a "minute,"
arguing that, thanks in part to the American
entry into the war, the time had come to
start up an ocean convoy system. Jellicoe
approved it the next day, so that when the
Prime Minister made his entry into the
Admiralty Board room on April 30, he
found his task, in Hankey's words, "greatly
simplified." The Admiralty set up a Convoy
Committee to take charge of organizing the
system and the first, experimental, convoys,
one from Gibraltar, the other from Hampton
Roads, set sail on May 10 and 24,
respectively. By September, the system was
in "full swing" for the Atlantic and Gibraltar
trade. Notably excluded until mid-1918,
ostensibly for a lack of escorts, was the
Mediterranean.
"It Is the Convoy System Which Baulked
Germany"
On October 13, 1918, with the armies of the
Central Powers in collapse and final Allied
victory around the corner, the Admiralty's
First Lord told American newspaper
reporters that it was the convoy system that
had "baulked Germany when she adopted
avowedly the inhuman and ruthless method
of submarine warfare considered
inconceivable and contrary to all the noble
traditions of the sea before the war. . ." No
one since has disagreed that the convoy
system was the key to defeating the
revolutionary changes in sea warfare
wrought by the submarine. It was a success
by any measure, the most important one
being, of course, the minimization of losses
of ships and cargoes.
37
In terms of sheer numbers, there never was
a dearth of potential British and Allied
escorts. The problem was that, even as the
convoy system came into full bloom, most
escort-capable ships were still committed to
wasteful hunt-and-kill and "protected lane"
patrol practices. According to one source,
only 257 out of a fleet wide total of 5,018
Allied warships, or 5.1 percent, were
committed to escort duties. It is tempting to
speculate that the Admiralty seized on the
prospect of American destroyers as a way to
preserve their professional self-esteem and
agree to a decision they knew at this point
would be made with or without them.
due to marine casualties. Meanwhile,
worldwide production of new shipping
managed to compensate for only half the
losses. The Admiralty, therefore, had good
reason, in the summer of 1917, to present
the War Cabinet with a rather gloomy
prognosis. With a projected monthly loss
rate of 650,000 tons and a national
shipbuilding capacity that added only onefifth of this number each month, the country
was, in the words of an Admiralty
memorandum, in a "very serious position."
The submarine campaign would not likely
force Britain to stop the war, but this could
only be guaranteed, "if America puts forth
her utmost effort." It was only starting in
April 1918 that monthly losses consistently
fell below 300,000 tons, and it was only in
May that Lloyd George could confidently
announce that, although the U-boat
continued to be a threat, it was no longer a
danger.
Surprisingly perhaps - or so it seemed at
first - escorts on convoy screens also turned
out to be relatively more productive U-boat
"killers" than their counterparts on
dedicated seek-and-destroy patrols. To be
sure, the convoy "antidote" did not become
obvious until the spring of 1918. Until then,
the U-boats continued to sink a monthly
average of nearly 400,000 tons. Even this
number underestimates the actual scale of
continuing losses, for it does not include an
average monthly loss of 40,000 tons due to
irreparable damage and another 30,000 tons
Successful Trans-Atlantic Convoy, October 1918
38
The statistics of the convoy system's
success are well known. Out of nearly
84,000 ships convoyed between February
1917 and October 1918, 257 were sunk for
a loss rate of 0.30 percent. During the same
period, 1,500 independents were lost for a
loss rate of 5.93 percent. Put in another
way, 85.5 percent of the losses suffered
came from independents. On the "offensive"
side of the ledger, escorts were responsible
for sinking 24 out of the 40 U-boats sunk by
surface vessels during the last 15 months of
the war. Hunting patrols accounted for one,
with the balance of 15 being the work of
ships patrolling the so-called "protected
lanes." Putting these two sets of figures
together - ships lost vs. U-boats sunk Marder has calculated an exchange rate of
19:1 for convoyed ships and 140:1 for
independents. In the first case, escorts were
the responsible "killers;" in the second
hunting forces and standing patrols. Marder
is fully justified in claiming that these
figures fully dispel any question about the
comparative effectiveness of convoy.
It appears that the reason for the convoy's
success is far less to be found in the
defensive capacity of its screen of escorts
(which, it must be remembered, still did not
have the ability to detect an underwater
enemy) than its ability to disappear.
Depending on its size, a convoy might
occupy an area from four to ten square
miles, seemingly, in Admiral Sims' words,
"about as desirable a target as the submarine
could have desired." In truth, and contrary
to expectations, ten square miles somewhere
among the millions of square miles of the
ocean, amount to a very small target. Put
differently, the probability of a submarine
39
encountering at least one out of, say, 40
ships sailing independently, is much higher
than its chance of falling upon a 40-ship
convoy. Admiral Sims wrote that, also
contrary to the popular perception, the
convoy and its destroyer screen were an
offensive system, which compelled the Uboats to fight for every ship they meant to
attack. The U-boats operated singly
(experimental operations with coordinated
pairs were begun in late 1917), which meant
that, if a convoy was sighted, a boat rarely
had a chance to complete more than one
attack. This explains why, out of the
hundreds of convoys, involving some
95,000 vessels, which were attacked by
U-boats, only 393 ships were sunk.
If the convoy system reversed the offensedefense balance by forcing the U-boat
hunter to put itself in harm's way, it also
served to overturn the balance between hideand-seek. Namely, by "emptying" the seas
of hundreds of defenseless merchantmen
scattered everywhere, the convoy organizers
had shifted the burden of finding the enemy
away from the ASW defender and to the
submarine attacker. Karl Dönitz, who would
lead the U-boats' second Battle of the
Atlantic in World War II but was a young
U-boat commander in 1918, noted that the
"oceans at once became bare and empty."
Empirical support for this observation lies
in that fact, for example, that of the 219
convoys that crossed the Atlantic between
October and December 1917, only 39 were
spotted.
Thanks to its excellent radio intercept
organization the Admiralty ensured that the
oceans were even emptier than they would
have been "naturally." Convoying, unlike
U-boat hunting, lent itself admirably to the
U-boat intelligence with complete
"situational awareness" about the location
of friendly shipping. As a result, wrote a
post-war Admiralty monograph, "for the
first time one could see the latest
information as to enemy submarines side by
side with the track of a convoy, and as the
(convoy) Commodore's ship was always
equipped with wireless, it was possible at
once to divert a convoy from a dangerous
area."
1917 German Magazine Cover
Reflecting National Confidence in the U-boat Fleet
work of the U-boat tracking section, which
had been set up in "Room 40," the
Admiralty's intelligence division in the
spring of 1917. As has already been noted,
throughout the war, the Admiralty had quite
reliable intelligence about the general
whereabouts and comings and goings of the
U-boats. The problem was that the
information was rarely accurate and current
enough for it to be useful at the tactical
level of submarine hunting. But it was
perfectly adequate to alert an incoming
convoy and divert it away from an area of
suspected submarine concentration. It had
been impossible to warn shipping while it
sailed independently, not only because no
one ashore could know from one day to the
next where every vessel was, but also
because many older ships still had no
wireless. The convoy system, on the other
hand, gave naval planners the means to fuse
40
There is a minor debate of sorts still on
what exactly made the convoy so
successful. Was it the ring of defensive
escorts, which, even if it did not "kill" Uboats, had a deterrent effect or at least made
attacks more difficult, or was it evasive
routine? Beesly admits it is impossible to
calculate how many ships were saved due to
re-routing but believes the numbers to have
been very significant. Sims was more
certain that evasive routing was the key to
the convoy's success. In his memoir, The
Victory at Sea, he goes so far as to point
out, "the interesting fact that, even had there
been no destroyer escort, the convoy itself
would have formed a great protection to
merchant shipping." Elsewhere he is quoted
that "history will show, when all the facts
are known, that more shipping was saved
through keeping track of submarines and
routing ships clear of them than by any
other single measure." It is curious that this
peculiar benefit had not been anticipated.
After all, one of the biggest handicaps of
fleet commanders in the past had always
been the difficulty of finding the enemy
fleet, especially when it did not want to be
found!
Postscript: The Reluctant
Convoyers
In his account of World War I, Churchill
labeled the convoy decision "the decisive
step" that defeated the U-boats. He even
cites the escorts' successful "offensive
actions." Yet, a world war later, when
convoying again proved the salvation of
Allied shipping, he confided how, "I always
sought to rupture this defensive obsession
by searching for forms of counteroffensive
. . .I could not rest content with the policy of
'convoy and blockade.'" Together, the two
pronouncements fairly sum up the
continuing ambivalence among many senior
naval officers on the subject of the convoy.
By any logical and empirical measure,
convoying had clearly shown to be the
most, perhaps only, effective means of
defeating the submarine's tonnage-sinking
capacity. It worked, and everyone, even
skeptics, agreed it did. Yet, for many
officers, this was not enough. They simply
did not like it.
WWI Convoy Manual
Used Again in WWII, Declassified 1972
Some Sources Consulted for: Defeating the U-boat: Inventing Anti-Submarine Warfare
Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 19141918. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich Publishers, 1982
Stephen Roskill, Hankey – Man of Secrets, Vol. I 1877-1918.
Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1970
Vice-Admiral K.G.B. DeWar, The Navy from Within.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1939
Eberhard Rössler, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical
History of German Submarines. Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 1981
Ernest Fayle, History of the Great War: Seaborne Trade,
Vol. II. New York: Longman, Green & Co., 1923
Eberhard Rössler, U-Boot Alarm: Zur Geschichte der U-BootAbwehr (1914-1945). Berlin: Brandenburgische Verlagshaus,
1998
Robert M. Grant, U-Boats Destroyed: The Effect of AntiSubmarine Warfare 1914-1918. London: Putnam, 1964
Michael Simpson, Ed., Anglo-American Naval Relations
1917-1919. Aldershot: Gower Publishing for the Navy
Records Society, 1991
Sir Norman Leslie, “The Convoy System in 1917-18: Convoy
and Transportation During the War.” Earl Brassey and John
Leyland, Eds., The Naval Review 1919. London: William
Clowes and Sons, 1919
(Memoirs of the principals, including Lloyd George,
Churchill, Jellicoe and Sims, and official histories and
documents have been deleted in the sake of brevity.)
Dwight R. Messimer, Find and Destroy: Antisubmarine
Warfare in World War I. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001.
41
The Great War Society
Trivia Challenge
Starting with this issue we will present a World War I trivia challenge for our readers. This issue the topic is:
Recognizing Your War Poets
Name the poet and the title of the work in which this memorable line appears:
1. There's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England
2. The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
3. Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung
4. A Garden called Gesthemane, in Picardy it was
5. And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
6. Where tongues were loud and hearts were light
I heard the Ancre flow.
7. If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base
8. The young men of the world
Are condemned to death.
They have been called up to die
For the crime of their fathers.
9. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
10. Gas! Gas! boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmet just in time;
Bonus Challenge:
Match the Poet With
His Selection on the Left
11. What then was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
12. Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance.
Answers on Page 46.
42
A Book Review From Len Shurtleff
Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front in the
First World War, by G. Irving Root
This is a survey history of the vast Eastern Front, extending
for nearly 1200 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea across
the Polish plains through the Pripet Marshes, the oil fields of
Silesia, the Carpathian Mountains and the Iron Gates of the
Danube and the Rumanian Dobrudja. Nearly all the
combatants on both sides were represented here: Russia,
Germany, Austria-Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Even the British and French had limited land and naval forces
engaged by the end of the war.
Huge armies grappled in the east. The Germans alone had as
many as two million men engaged at the height of the
fighting, suffering over a million casualties over four years.
Austria-Hungary had over 44 divisions, half her army,
deployed against Russia, which, in turn, deployed nearly half
of her 294 divisions against the Germans and AustroHungarians. Casualty figures for Russia are unreliable but go
as high as ten million military and civilian dead. Civilian
losses, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of
refugees (many of them Poles, Lithuanians or Ukrainians)
displaced in the deep Russian retreat of 1915, are impossible
to determine.
The author starts his survey with a review of the strategic
position of the protagonists in 1914, moving through the overwhelming German 1914 victories at
Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the 1915 battles in Galicia and the Carpathians, the Brusilov Offensive
and the defeat of Rumania in 1916, the disintegration of the Czarist army and government in 1917, to the post1918 battles between the Red Army and the newly independent Polish state, the Rumanian invasion of
Hungary and the actions of German Frei Korps, in the Silesian Plebiscite War of 1921. Also covered in
useful detail are command rivalries within the Imperial German and Russian Armies and between the
German and Austro-Hungarian commands, as well as the various treaties (Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest)
ending the conflict.
In all, this is a valuable addition to the slim library of WWI Eastern Front histories* and well worth reading.
Weaknesses include the maps (which though plentiful and detailed are monochromatic and hard to decipher)
and exclusive reliance on secondary sources. Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front in the First
World War, G. Irving Root, Publish America, 2007, 387 pages, bibliography, maps, ISBN 1 4241 6800 7,
$24.95 paperback. Visit Ambassador Len Shurtleff's "WWI Bookshelf" at www.wfa-usa.org/new/books.htm
For those interested in further reading:
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, Norman Stone, Simon & Schuster, 1975
Handcuffed to a Corpse: German Intervention in the Balkans and on the Galician Front, 1914-1917,
Michael P. Kihntoph, White Mane, 2002
43
Reviews from the Online Newsletter
St. Mihiel Trip-Wire
A Film Review by Andrew Melomet
The Log of the U-35
The top-scoring U-boat ace of both world wars was Kapitän
Leutnant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière. How did an
Imperial German Naval commander have a French name? I've
read two different accounts as to his name's origin. The first is
that he was the son of a French officer captured in the FrancoPrussian War who decided to stay in Germany. The second
version I've read traces the family back to an 18th-century
soldier of fortune great-grandfather who after a disagreement
with the Duke of Bourbon offered his sword to Frederick the
Great. The following generations would serve either in the
Army or the Navy.
In 1903, when he was 17, Von Arnauld joined the German
Navy. Before the war he served as torpedo officer aboard the
cruiser Emden. Then he became aide-de-camp to Grand
Admiral von Tirpitz and was serving on the Admiralty Staff
when the war started. First, von Arnauld tried for a zeppelin
command. But with no zeppelin commands available he
eventually found himself taking command of U-35. From
January 1916 to March 1918 he racked up a formidable record,
sinking 194 ships totaling over 453,000 tons. Under his
Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière
command, the U-35 fired only four torpedoes, one of which
missed the target. Von Arnauld's weapon of choice was his 88mm deck gun. He was awarded the "Blue
Max," the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest award and asked for and got an autographed photograph
from the Kaiser. Later the Kaiser sent him a handwritten personal letter of commendation.
The German High Command realized they had a "star performer" in the Navy, and just as they had
assigned a film crew to von Richthofen's squadron, they assigned a film crew of one to be the official
cameraman on the March/May 1917 patrol of the U-35 in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.
After slipping past Gibraltar, the U-35 began its hunt. In an interview after the war with Lowell Thomas
for Raiders of the Deep (1928), von Arnauld described how the cameraman operated: "It was on this
voyage that we had a movie man along. Poor devil! His face still haunts me. Pea green it was most of the
time. You see, he had never before gone to sea on a submarine, and he was a sufferer from mal de mer in
its most virulent form. Usually he stuck to his camera crank as a real film hero should. Shells and bullets
and oncoming torpedoes could not drive him from it. But sea sickness did. There were times when he
longed for a shell to come along with his name written on it, to end it all. Then, when Neptune waved his
wand and stilled the rolling deep, that cinema man was a hero once more. If we got into a rough-andtumble gunfight with an armed ship he would take his own sweet time and would coolly refocus his magic
box and switch lenses as though it were a hocus-pocus battle on location instead of grim reality." This
patrol saw the U-35 sinking 23 ships, totaling 68,000 tons.
44
The film was released in Germany as Der Magische Gürtel (The Enchanted Circle). The title was a
reference to a statement by Churchill. The footage shot has been used and reused in numerous
documentaries on submarine warfare and the naval war of World War One.
Eventually the British captured a copy and released their own version for propaganda purposes with new
English intertitles under the title "The Exploits of a German Submarine (U35) Operating in the
Mediterranean". This version and the original German release are currently available on VHS (PAL and
NTSC) restored by the Imperial War Museum.
U-35 in Harbor
And, later, the Americans got hold of copies, as well. Rowland V. Lee, a former actor at the Thomas Ince
studio and later a director (Son of Frankenstein, etc.) served in the front lines and fought in the Battle of
St. Mihiel. He worked on the "Smiles Films," professionally-shot movies of families at home shown to the
troops in Europe. Lee saw a captured print of Der Magische Gurtel at Coblenz, American Occupation
Headquarters. He wanted to get hold of the film and ship it back to the States as a historical record. After
the projectionist left, Lee piled up the film cans in a corner and hid them under some newspapers. When
he returned later the cans were gone. J.H. Mackzum, a German-born Knights of Columbus secretary found
the hidden cache and got them off to Hearst News, which featured them in the newsreel Hearst News No.
64.
The New York Times reviewed this footage on November 11, 1919, stating that "these pictures were made
by officers on German submarines and were obtained from the present German Government by J.H.
Mackzum, a Knights of Columbus secretary, who brought them to America." On January 5, 1920 the New
York Times printed another review possibly based on the British release. "The most unusual and most
powerful picture on the program is one entitled, 'The Log of the U-35,' which, like a similar film brought
here by J.H. Mackzum, a Knights of Columbus secretary, and shown at the Rialto seven weeks ago, is said
to have been made on a German submarine during the war and to have been obtained by allied
45
representatives since the armistice. It shows cargo steamers and a picturesque schooner stopped by the
submarine, wounded by its shells and bombs, and then sinking, each one slowly at first, with a different
turn or roll of dumb helplessness before finally disappearing with a hurried plunge into its grave. For those
to whom ships are something human, or magnificently triumphant human creations, these pictures of their
assassination by forces controlled by men are overwhelmingly tragic--or, to the mood of despair, hellishly
comic."
World War I Films of the Silent Era, released by Image Entertainment, includes a version of The Log of
the U-35 that is a combination of the 1919 British version and the 1920 American versions of Der
Magische Gürtel. This collection also includes the documentary Fighting the War (1916), The Secret
Game (1917) directed by William C. de Mille and starring Sessue Hayakawa, Florence Vidor, Jack Holt
and Charles Ogle. The Moving Picture Boys in the Great War (1975) narrated by Lowell Thomas is
included as a "Bonus Documentary." I highly recommend this collection.
U-35 in the Mediterranean
And what happened to the U-35 and von Arnauld? The U-35 was transferred to England after the war and
was docked in Blyth from 1919 to 1920 before being broken up. Von Arnauld went on to command the
third cruiser named Emden from September 1928 to October 1930. He taught at the Turkish Naval
Academy from 1932 to 1938. Von Arnauld served in the Kriegsmarine as a vice-admiral and held
commands in occupied Europe before dying in a plane crash in France in February 1941.
Andrew Melomet, Proprietor of Andy's Nickelodeon, contributes monthly reviews at the
Trip-Wire (http://www.worldwar1.com/tripwire/smtw.htm). The Trip-Wire is affiliated with Trenches on
the Web but is popular with members of all the military history groups.
Trivia Answers: 1. Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier" Image A 2. John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" 3. A.E. Housman,
"Here Dead We Lie" 4. Rudyard Kipling, "Gesthemane (1914-1918)" 5. Alan Seeger, "Rendezvous" Image D
6. Edmund Blunden, "The Ancre at Hamel" 7. Siegfried Sassoon," Base Details" 8. F.S. Flint, "Lament" 9. Isaac
Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches" Image C 10. Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" Image B 11. Robert
Graves, "Recalling War" 12. Edward Thomas, "Roads"
46
90th Anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne: Map and Key Locations
There are numerous sites to visit in the Meuse-Argonne sector. This map from American Armies and
Battlefields in Europe has been highlighted to show some of the most important and impressive.
A.
New Henry Gunther Memorial near Chaumont-devantDamillers
B. New Lost Battalion Monument at Binarville
C. New Sgt. York Historic Trail near Châtel-Chéhéry
D. Pennsylvania Memorial at Varennes (Off-Map)
E. Butte de Vacquois, Jump-Off Point of 35th Division
(Off Map)
F. Montfaucon: Early Objective & Site of U.S.
Monument
47
G.
Romagne: Region of Strong German Defenses in MidPeriod & Site of U.S. Cemetery
H. Barricourt Heights: Major Obstacle in November 1
Assault
I. Dun-sur-Meuse: Site of Major River Crossing on
November 5; Frank Luke Memorial East of Town
J. Heights of la Marée Dominating Sedan
K. Site of River Crossing of November 10-11, Last
Major Attack of World War I
My fellow countrymen, The armistice
was signed this morning. Everything
for which America fought has been
accomplished. It will now be
our fortunate duty to assist by
example by sober friendly counsel and by
material aid in the establishment
of just democracy throughout
the world.
Woodrow Wilson
90 Years Ago
President Wilson Announces the Armistice
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
Gift of Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, 1930
48