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Authors: Stephen Budiansky
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sea lord. The two admirals had known each other for years, having first crossed paths in China in 1901, and Sims found the British admiral the same calm, imperturbable, frank, and approachable man he remembered, “all courtesy, all brain,” betraying none of the immense burdens his job carried. British newspapers had been full of vaguely reassuring statements suggesting that the German U-boat offensive had already proved a failure and, as Sims would observe in the coming days, “this same atmosphere of cheerful ignorance” prevailed “everywhere in London society.” After a few preliminary pleasantries, the first sea lord took a paper out of his desk and handed it to Sims. “I never imagined anything so terrible,” Sims would recall. It was a record of actual British and neutral tonnage lost since the unrestricted U-boat campaign had begun, and it was a disaster. Sinkings had surpassed 500,000 tons a month in February and March; they would hit 900,000 tons in April if the current rate of destruction held. Sims, astonished, said that it looked like the Germans were winning the war. Jellicoe agreed. “They will win, unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon.”
“Is there no solution?”
“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe replied. 21
Actually there was a solution: Jellicoe himself had vetoed it. Jellicoe had arrived at the Admiralty the previous December determined to shake up the antisubmarine effort. Until then there was no single command responsible for the British response to the U-boats, and the new first sea lord moved swiftly to take charge and establish a new Anti-Submarine Division. A week later a new man arrived at 10 Downing Street equally determined to put new life into the British war effort: the venerable Liberal David Lloyd George had been chosen to take the helm of the national unity government in the face of waning confidence in Prime Minister Henry Asquith. Impressed by a cabinet paper arguing the effectiveness of convoying merchant ships as a way to protect them from submarine attack, Lloyd George pressed Jellicoe to look into the idea as the first appalling sinking statistics began to arrive in February 1917.
Convoys were not, however, what Jellicoe had in mind. He thought they were impractical and ineffective, and the Admiralty’s experts concurred: “It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully, and the greater the difficulty of the escort in preventing such an attack.” Actually,
exactly
the opposite was the case; but Jellicoe was also swayed by the fact that the merchant shippers themselves opposed the idea, and at a conference at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, both the navy men and ten merchant sea officers summoned to discuss the matter all agreed that merchant ships could not possibly manage to keep station in a large, zigzagging convoy. There were undeniable challenges in seamanship involved, but the shippers also just disliked the delays and nuisance of waiting for a convoy to assemble and having to sail under Admiralty orders, and navy officers disliked the idea of being reduced to ferrying a bunch of tubs back and forth across the ocean. 22
But Sims was a firm believer in convoys and he began to “emphatically” press the matter, too. Sims pointed out that “sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself.” He pointedly added that the British navy already implicitly recognized the principle of convoying when it came to protecting their own battle fleets from submarines: battleships never moved without an accompanying destroyer screen shielding them. But his clinching argument was that a limited convoysystem—euphemistically termed “controlled sailings”—had already been introduced at French insistence in February for colliers supplying coal to France, and had been a clear-cut success.
“Is there no solution?”
“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe replied. 21
Actually there was a solution: Jellicoe himself had vetoed it. Jellicoe had arrived at the Admiralty the previous December determined to shake up the antisubmarine effort. Until then there was no single command responsible for the British response to the U-boats, and the new first sea lord moved swiftly to take charge and establish a new Anti-Submarine Division. A week later a new man arrived at 10 Downing Street equally determined to put new life into the British war effort: the venerable Liberal David Lloyd George had been chosen to take the helm of the national unity government in the face of waning confidence in Prime Minister Henry Asquith. Impressed by a cabinet paper arguing the effectiveness of convoying merchant ships as a way to protect them from submarine attack, Lloyd George pressed Jellicoe to look into the idea as the first appalling sinking statistics began to arrive in February 1917.
Convoys were not, however, what Jellicoe had in mind. He thought they were impractical and ineffective, and the Admiralty’s experts concurred: “It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully, and the greater the difficulty of the escort in preventing such an attack.” Actually,
exactly
the opposite was the case; but Jellicoe was also swayed by the fact that the merchant shippers themselves opposed the idea, and at a conference at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, both the navy men and ten merchant sea officers summoned to discuss the matter all agreed that merchant ships could not possibly manage to keep station in a large, zigzagging convoy. There were undeniable challenges in seamanship involved, but the shippers also just disliked the delays and nuisance of waiting for a convoy to assemble and having to sail under Admiralty orders, and navy officers disliked the idea of being reduced to ferrying a bunch of tubs back and forth across the ocean. 22
But Sims was a firm believer in convoys and he began to “emphatically” press the matter, too. Sims pointed out that “sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself.” He pointedly added that the British navy already implicitly recognized the principle of convoying when it came to protecting their own battle fleets from submarines: battleships never moved without an accompanying destroyer screen shielding them. But his clinching argument was that a limited convoysystem—euphemistically termed “controlled sailings”—had already been introduced at French insistence in February for colliers supplying coal to France, and had been a clear-cut success.
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