U-Boats on the North Atlantic

THE MONTH OF JULY, 1914, THE LAST OF THE OLD ERA, HAD ONLY an hour or so to live. Four days out of New York, the cabin passengers on the German luxury liner Kronprinzessin Cecelie were dancing through the summer evening as the great ship plowed her way toward her first British port of call, only eight hundred miles away. Suddenly the helm was put about and the engines drove her at top speed back toward America. The mystified passengers were quickly informed by Captain Polak that war was impending in Europe, and he had been ordered back to New York.

In earlier years, the ship would probably have blundered on into enemy hands, but now the wireless had sent the warning. The fog grew thick but the speed did not slacken. The pleas for caution by the passengers, who had the Titanic's fate fresh in their minds, fell on deaf ears. The captain had more than his passengers' nervous chills to worry him; a cargo of gold, worth twice as much as the five-million-dollar liner herself, was aboard. She was a prize in ten thousand for the British and French cruisers, whose wireless messages were crackling through the fog, far too close for comfort. Efforts at capture were foiled, and the Cecelie won her race a few hours before England declared war on Germany. Early on August 4, she was piloted to an anchorage at Bar Harbor by a passenger, who knew the waters from having yachted on that rocky coast.

For the first time in fifty years the seas belonged to the raider; and the hunted scurried to cover. Many other German merchantmen were less fortunate than the Cecelie. A British admiral, so it is said, kept the day-by-day position of each and every one of them wherever they might be all over the world-marked upon

a globe at the Admiralty. At any rate, hundreds were snapped up on the high seas or in enemy ports, while the rest clung to the safety of neutral harbors or home waters. Almost overnight, the German merchant flag disappeared from the high seas, not to reappear for more than four years.

The hectic uncertainty of the first days of war endangered more than German merchantmen. Rumor placed three German cruisers and some armed liners in the North Atlantic. The dense August fogs shielded fleeing British liners, too. The Mauretania strained her engines to a new record of twenty-seven knots, in a race for the safety of Halifax. A British cruiser escorted the Olympic to Sandy Hook and returned with the Lusitania.

Meanwhile, lesser vessels by the hundreds lay idle in port, with accumulating cargoes clogging the water fronts. Shipowners feared to risk their vessels, and exporters their cargoes, on that apparently perilous ocean. Remembering the Alabama situation, when worry over enemy raiding did more damage than the raiding itself, the British government took quick steps to counteract the stagnation. It announced government war-risk insurance on hulls and cargoes at a flat moderate rate—at a moment when the private marine insurance men of Lloyd's and the New York market were not yet ready to risk their capital. By this prompt action, vessels soon began to move. By the middle of August, the Admiralty called the North Atlantic safe, and before long the private companies were quoting rates of 1 per cent. For six months, shipping came and went across the Atlantic virtually undisturbed.

Those stormy three thousand miles were as usual the most important of the sea lanes and the real "life line of the British Empire." Unlike the route past Gibraltar and Suez to the East, there was no substitute, however roundabout, for the Atlantic shuttle. That fact gave special significance to the Battle of the Atlantic in both wars, as well as to what occurred in the adjacent European waters. The other more distant sea lanes will be considered later.

As for the relation of the United States to the shipping situa

tion, it was, both as neutral and belligerent, markedly different from what it had been in the past. In earlier days, we had had vessels enough not only for our own cargoes but also for a considerable share of the belligerent carrying trade; but in both these wars our vessels were too few at the outset for more than a fraction of our own shipping needs. As our cargoes had become more vital than our own shipping to us, so naturally our interest centered more on the foreign vessels carrying those cargoes. Their services had become absolutely necessary to us if we wanted to get our munitions and food overseas. Other contrasts with our earlier years of neutral profits occurred in our modern periods of neutrality from 1914 to 1917 and from 1939 to 1941. In 1914, with German shipping quickly out of the picture, our attention centered, beyond our own meager seagoing fleet, upon the thousands of Scandinavian or other neutral vessels, and upon the belligerent merchantmen headed by England's tremendous aggregation of liners and freighters.

While American trade with England and most of the Continent was little disturbed during the first six months, the North Sea was a different matter. Mines laid first by the Germans and later by the British made traffic highly dangerous. The German mine fields even in the first week of the war extended over to the coast of England, and by fall the British had thoroughly mined the southern end of the North Sea. Later the situation became worse when submarines began to lay mines up to the Thames approaches. England kept mine sweepers at work to maintain "swept channels" for its own east-coast shipping, and in order to force neutral vessels into its waters for inspection.

Here, three of these American steamers engaged in that brief direct cotton trade with Germany went to the bottom early in 1915. Except for a sailing ship sunk by a raider off Brazil, these were the first American victims of the war. The insurance rates as usual reflected the dangers. Although at the end of 1914 the rate on neutral vessels to the west-coast British ports was only % of 1 per cent, it was double that amount to the North Sea

ports, five times as much to Holland, and eleven times as high to Scandinavia.

Another hazard to overseas trade lay in the remote-control methods of the modern British blockade, which we have already noted. In 1915 some five thousand neutral vessels were subjected to delay and search at the northern control stations alone, while others were undergoing similar treatment at the Mediterranean stations. As England tightened its contraband regulations to prevent leakage into Germany through adjacent neutral states, it purchased or condemned many American cargoes bound for such destinations. The Admiralty judges, with a good sense of humor, cited Civil War precedents of American condemnations of British vessels. Those American decisions in turn, it will be recalled, had been based on British "continuous voyage" precedents, when American vessels had been condemned by the Admiralty courts in the Napoleonic period. Those British actions naturally hit heavily at American profits; and, as we have seen, the United States soon saw that roundabout sales to Germany through the ports of neutral neighbors were out of the question, along with direct trade.

Americans began to recall impatiently their strenuous upholding of "freedom of the seas" against similar British practices a century before. Then the United States had had little or no navy to back its claims, but this time it was well aware it was in a position to demand what it had had to plead for earlier. The mere threat of an embargo, in view of the desperate British need of munitions and foodstuffs, would have quickly modified the blockade methods. With a navy almost as strong as Germany's, we could, moreover, have easily played havoc with that blockade. The governor of Texas, anxious about cotton exports, demanded such action with his call for "American ironclads to England's doors."

But the United States government refused to use either of those trumps. The sting of the occasional strong protests by the State Department was removed by the manner in which Page, our strongly pro-British ambassador, presented them to the For

eign Office, or by what the President's confidential adviser murmured to the British envoy at Washington. As a result, the reassured British carefully delayed their replies until some incident had stirred up anti-German feeling; then they would calmly announce the continuation of their policy. The man in the street railed at times at the activities of the Dover Patrol and the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, but the British felt safe in persisting with the blockade, although they took care not to flout Americans too openly. They were much embarrassed, for example, when the Hamburg-American freighter Dacia was transferred to American registry and sailed for Germany with a cargo of Texas cotton. Such use of Germany's interned ships naturally irritated the British; yet they hesitated to seize her. Ambassador Page, of all people, rescued them from their dilemma by a convenient hint; it was as the prize of a French cruiser that the Dacia was taken into Brest. No such compromise nor tolerance marked the American clamor for "freedom of the seas," however, when German countermeasures endangered American trade.

The Glitra was a humble little British freighter with a prosaic cargo of coal, iron plates, and oil, but she provided an important "first time" in maritime history as the first merchant victim of the new submarine warfare. In October, 1914, en route from England to a Norwegian port, she was stopped by a German U-boat and her crew was given ten minutes to abandon ship. Thousands of merchantmen were to follow her to the bottom of the sea in this war and the next, as the Germans, driven from the surface of the seas by superior British naval strength, perfected their submarine tactics.

Two weeks after the sinking of the Glitra, England proclaimed the North Sea a war zone, which warned the Germans that their food supply was in danger. A group of German naval officers quickly drew up a memorandum urging the use of U-boats to threaten, in turn, England's overseas supply lines in the same way-by sinking merchantmen. The day before Christmas, Admiral von Tirpitz, the tough, bewhiskered naval chief, was quoted by an interviewing journalist as saying: