Submarine Warfare Essays - Submarines, Submarine Warfare, U-boat

Submarine Warfare Submarine Warfare The First "World War," also known as the Great War, took place after the turn of the century from 1914 to 1918, and was named this because it was the first conflict of global proportions. The war resulted in the loss of military lives and the near destruction of Europe. The massive destruction of the war was largely a result of the use of technology in warfare. The use of technology in warfare was a result of the industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century which brought mechanization and mass production to society. This brought the use of things never used or heard of into the war and included airplanes, submarines, and tanks, as well as radio communications, machine guns, and poison gas. The use of submarines played a major part in getting the U.S. to join the war. With the launching of the Dreadnought, the first battle ship to concentrate all artillery power to massive twelve inch guns and break the twenty knot speed barrier, the worlds navies became obsolete overnight. The world powers were rushing to build a new class of war ships to replace the older out dated ones. Germany and England soon became entrapped in a naval arms race, with each trying keep pace with the other's building program. When the War arrived in 1914, both Germany and England had navies made up of heavily armed capital ships, which were large heavily armed and thickly armored battle ships such as Destroyers. The world waited for the clash of Germany's high seas fleet and England's Grand fleet. The Great War ships only had a few encounters such as in the battle at Jutland and Dogger while the underestimated and largely overlooked submarine would play a revolutionary part. In the War's second month Germany's tiny U-boat fleet made up of only twenty six submarines and ranking fifth in size among the war's combatants demonstrated the tremendous offensive potential of the "Underseeboot". On September 5th, 1914 commanding officer on the U-21 Korvettenkapitan Otto Hersing found the British light cruiser Pathfinder moving toward his position, submerging the U-boat had only to wait till the Pathfinder was within his range. He fired a single torpedo and hit the Pathfinder accurately and the ship went down in under four minutes with heavy loss of life. The true eye opener came merely seventeen days later when the U-9, under the command of Kapitanleutnant otto Weddigen, sank three 10,000 ton British armored cruisers, Aboukir, Houge, and Cressy in the course of only one hour using five torpedoes. Approximately one thousand four hundred British sailors lost their lives in the attack and the loss of three capital ships was embarrassing to the British Navy. Naval establishments around the world sat up and took notice at that point. The sinking of the British cruisers had proven the submarine's worth to the military as an offensive weapon but its use against merchant shipping brought the weapon its own place in the military world. On February 4, 1915 angered by the British blockade of the North Sea, Germany declared the water around the British Isles a war zone. Germany now would sink all merchant vessels found in those waters without warning. This was the first time the world had seen a form of unrestricted submarine warfare on merchant shipping. As result England was receiving no goods from the outside world which was very nearly starving out England because of the unmerciful nature of the German attacks. The United States, long a neutral spectator to the war, found herself slowly being drawn into the conflict. Before her entry in 1917 a warning was sent by Germany that American waters would not be immune to the U-boat threat. Germans sent two voyages to the town of Newport, Rhode Island in that same year. After the United states entered the war on April 6, 1917 they waited for a reappearance of the submarines for months before seeing another U-boat. When they finally did it was for the sinking of the American ship S.S. Carolina. The S.S. Carolina was a five thousand ton passenger liner transporting over 217 passengers from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York City. When a message was intercepted by a wireless operator that the Isabel B. Wiley was sunk by a German U-boat, no more that fifteen miles away, the message was instantly sent to the S.S. Carolina. Captain Barbour then put his ship in a defensive zig zag pattern to make the ship a less easy target but it was too late. The U-boat had already fired shells in to