Key Points:

• The development of the automotive torpedo during World War I helped submarines to become more efficient by allowing them to attack from a safe distance.
• During World War I, Germany’s U-boats engaged unrestricted submarine warfare, devastating attacks on British ships notably the Lusitania.
• Though first suspended, Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare was revived in 1917, which finally helped the United States to join the war and shape its result.
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Transcript:

[00:00:00] Austin Smith: So, so talk to me about that. What happened in the world wars with U boats and the Pacific and submarines were where the submarines really started to become the dominant platform that we knew them to be in that conflict?

[00:00:11] Michael Muir: Yeah, certainly. Yeah. So I think you could characterize the early experiments is almost like proof of concept. they can work. But the big breakthrough for making submarines viable was the advent of the automotive torpedo. So this was this meant that a Basically an underwater missile that could be launched and would propel itself, to the enemy vessel, which meant you could engage vessels from a safe distance, not the end of a stick, so that obviously took a lot of the danger out.

[00:00:40] Michael Muir: There was a lot of improvements in just the mechanics, of the submarines. So when we get to World War I, again, the striking pattern reveals itself. The Germans kind of led the way in this development, and this was a way of evening the odds against the British. Now, before World War I, I think some of our audience may be aware of this, there was a naval race between Germany and Great Britain, where the Kaiser, Philip II, was a real admirer of the British Navy and wanted to develop a German equivalent.

[00:01:14] Michael Muir: but there was a couple of factors that were limiting that, the most notable one being geography. Britain as an island doesn’t need to maintain a large land army. But then you look at Germany, and at the time, in the years before World War I, is bordered by two hostile powers either side of it.

[00:01:31] Michael Muir: So they could never quite pour the same level of resources into developing a surface Navy as the British could. And the British for them having a Navy, their policy was two to one, which meant that their Navy had to be more powerful than the next two combined. And again, we just to go back to that point about geography, they didn’t need to have an army.

[00:01:50] Michael Muir: So a large army, so they could put everything into staying well ahead of the German Navy. And of course the irony of all of that, it was the Germany had poured all this time and effort into developing a surface fleet and spent virtually the entire war ad hoc, except for one battle. But anyway, so the U boats were an attempt to even the odds against the British.

[00:02:10] Michael Muir: Royal Navy, which they couldn’t compete with on even keel now in the early part of the war So the idea for so britain geography is a great advantage in developing naval power But it’s also a great weakness in terms of supplying a war effort. they were still heavily dependent on imports not just for war materials, but just for food.

[00:02:29] Michael Muir: In general, they didn’t produce enough food for the population, so they had to import the rest. So the Germans identified that weakness quite early on, and then they used inter sea boats, or U boats as we commonly refer to them, to attack shipping. Now, what’s really interesting is in 1914, when the war just begins, the German U boats still adhere to what are called prize rules.

[00:02:50] Michael Muir: so naval warfare, operates under specific laws that have been, that were established a long time ago. And the idea was, under prize rules, a submarine would get close to a merchant ship and would give the crew an opportunity to evacuate before they destroyed the ship. and things were done. Now, the British, obviously very vulnerable, to U boat attacks, developed a strategy to overcome that, and these were called Q ships.

[00:03:18] Michael Muir: So the answer to a U boat is a Q ship. That’s a decoy ship. So it was a warship disguised as a merchant vessel. So when the U boat was, in fact, it didn’t, when we say U boat, we think, we generally think of submarines as spending all their time underwater, but that’s Definitely not the case, especially these early world war one, devices.

[00:03:38] Michael Muir: They can only stand our water for very short periods of time. What’s the surface. So the Q ships were disguised as merchant ships and the submarines would get close, threaten them, and then the roofs would be lifted. And you have to be pretty damn brave to serve on a Q ship. Cause you’re under, you have to let the submarines get really close, but that works pretty well for a while.

[00:03:58] Michael Muir: And then the Germans introduced a new strategy called unrestricted submarine warfare, which is kind of. What we might think of as classic submarine warfare in the sense, no warning, underwater torpedo from a safe distance. and that was devastating, to the British, but it came with a hidden cost. So, all the waters around the British Isles were considered fair game for German submarines.

[00:04:20] Michael Muir: Now, of course, not all of the ships entering, British waters were necessarily British, or even if they were British, they would have a lot of citizens of other countries. so we get to this infamous situation in May of 1915, where a British passenger ship called the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine.

[00:04:37] Michael Muir: It was a U boat 20, I believe, and what made this really controversial is the British, first of all, as they would, were complaining this was just evidence. this is a passenger liner, they insisted. This was just evidence that the Germans were barbaric, and it was a great recruiting and propaganda tool, Some of our viewers might remember, there’s a very striking image of a woman underwater cradling a baby, and this was like the vile German U boats doing this. But the other aspect, and perhaps more importantly, was there were 123 American citizens on board the Lusitania. So that drove a permanent wedge, between the United States and Germany.

[00:05:13] Michael Muir: It didn’t draw the United States into the war at that point, but it did come pretty close. And something that people might Forget or I’ll be aware of there were a lot of German Americans in the United States at that time, and there still are, but at that time it was one of the largest immigrant groups.

[00:05:27] Michael Muir: There were a lot of people in the United States that might have been otherwise predisposed to sympathize with the German cause. But incidents like that create a lot of diplomatic tensions and it forced Germany to abandon unrestricted warfare in September of 1915 because of the risk of drawing other nations into the war.

[00:05:45] Michael Muir: So for a couple of years, The Germans didn’t practice unrestricted submarine warfare, but then the effects of the cumulative effects of the naval blockade by the British on German ports forced them to do it again in 1917, and that was one of several factors that ultimately drew the United States into the war.

[00:06:05] Michael Muir: And that, of course, doomed, Germany to defeat. I mean, there was a lot of other factors, but just a very simple version of the story is resuming unrestricted warfare, guaranteed the United States would ultimately get into the war, and it had a huge impact on the war’s outcome. So we don’t generally think of World War I as a a submarine conflict, if you will, but that was a huge part of the war and it had a huge, bearing on its outcome.

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