![]() Though short in duration, British losses were a cause for concern as merchant shipping production slowed due to other demands of the British war machine. This brief submarine campaign accounted for 143 ships sunk in March and April 1916, and the Germans lost four U-boats in the same period. Disgusted with his government’s decision, High Seas Fleet Commander Reinhard Scheer (1863-1928) recalled his U-boats and employed them with the fleet in support of North Sea operations. The US government once again threatened war, and on 24 April the German government ordered the navy to follow Prize Rules. On 24 March, UB-29 torpedoed the Sussex, injuring three Americans. Germany ran into diplomatic problems almost at once, with strong protests from the Dutch and American governments. The second campaign began on 1 March with fifty-two operational U-boats available to the Germans. Using the widespread arming of merchant vessels as justification, they gained approval from the German government to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare, with orders to spare passenger liners. German naval leaders decided to seek a new U-boat campaign in the waters surrounding Britain in early 1916. As historian Paul Halpern explains, from the start of the war through September 1915, total losses in merchant tonnage approximately equaled new construction. However, when compared to the total volume of merchant traffic on the high seas, losses were relatively light. The campaign had been costly for the British, especially during the summer months of 1915. At this point, the Germans confined their U-boats to the North Sea using Prize Rules for encounters there, and switched their focus to Mediterranean trade routes, thus ending the first U-boat campaign. The German government relented and stated that attacks against passenger liners would henceforth be forbidden. ![]() On 19 August, U-24 attacked the SS Arabic, killing three Americans and driving Woodrow Wilson's (1856-1924) administration to threaten breaking diplomatic relations. The Germans countered that the Lusitania was carrying war contraband - which it was - and ignored US complaints. On, U-20 torpedoed the RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, a disaster that caused the death of 1,198 civilians, including 128 Americans, and brought immediate protest from the US government. Lacking anti-submarine weaponry and tactics, British attempts to counter the U-boats were ineffective. The Germans found immediate success, initially sinking approximately two ships per day by employing a force of thirty operational U-boats. Ships would be sunk without warning, in clear violation of the Prize Rules. On 4 February 1915, the German government declared the waters around Britain and Ireland a war zone, threatening destruction of all “enemy” merchant vessels and issuing a warning to neutrals. In response to the British blockade and declaration of the North Sea as a war zone, German leaders decided to embark on a counter blockade using U-boats to sink merchant shipping. They also normally could not spare crew members to act as a prize crew and had no capacity to take interned merchant crew members onboard the submarine. ![]() Submarine captains put their vessels and crew members at risk by carrying out these rules when they surfaced to conduct an inspection. Accordingly, the rules mandated that naval vessels had to stop and search the merchant vessel and account for the safety of the crew, either by taking them on the warship, providing a prize crew to lead the merchant vessel to a friendly port, or by putting them into life boats in close proximity to land. While submarines could attack warships without warning, internationally recognized Prize Law prescribed a relatively strict set of norms for naval vessels capturing or sinking enemy merchant vessels. ![]() Additionally, by early 1915 the Royal Navy had largely neutralized the German surface raider threat to merchant shipping. When the war opened in 1914, Britain possessed the largest submarine force with seventy-five boats, while France and Germany had fifty and thirty, respectively.Īs the stalemate developed on the Western Front and Britain’s blockade of German trade became increasingly effective, German naval leaders explored the idea of using submarines as commerce raiders. Armed with effective torpedoes and a mine-laying capability, they served as coastal defense weapon systems and posed a threat to even the most powerful warships of the enemy. The world’s major naval powers began fielding “modern” submarines in the decade leading up to the First World War. ![]()
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