Blackett's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

points, in particular the rules respecting the rights of neutrals. Although never formally ratified, the London Declaration for the most part was simply a restatement of the existing admiralty court precedents that constituted the international law of naval war. Notably, while offering one exception to the rule that ships of neutral countries always had to be taken into port for “the determination of all questions concerning the validity of the capture”—Articles 49 and 50 permitted the destruction of neutral vessels that were otherwise subject to capture and condemnation in the case “of exceptional necessity,” if “the safety of the warship” or “the success of the operations in which she is engaged at the time” would be endangered—the declaration underscored the one inviolable principle: “Before the vessel is destroyed all persons on board must be placed in safety.”
    Submarines could hardly take on board “all persons” from a freighter orpassenger liner before sinking her with gunfire or torpedoes; nor did they have men enough of their own to spare to place aboard a captured vessel as a prize crew; nor the armament to escort a prize to port and protect it from recapture along the way by an enemy warship.
    But it was the grand strategic ideas of navy men of the early twentieth century that spoke loudest in relegating the submarine to a small, and largely defensive, supporting role. Mahan’s writings on sea power theory had been enormously influential in all major naval powers of the world, and if there was one sacred truth in the gospel according to Mahan, it was that navies existed to defeat an enemy’s navy. Concentrating one’s naval power in a single mighty fleet would force an enemy into a climactic fleet-on-fleet battle that would decisively secure control of the oceans for subsequent operations; meanwhile, the very threat posed by such a concentrated force would compel the enemy to concentrate his forces as well to avoid defeat in detail, thereby leaving his own coasts vulnerable and checking his ability to conduct smaller forays. Commerce raiding was, in this view, a fatal dispersion of effort, or at best an inglorious sideshow to the real action.
    Certainly that was Germany’s conception in the years leading up to 1914. A British diplomat who visited Berlin before the war seeking a diplomatic end to the spiraling naval arms race between the two powers found the Kaiser a devotee of Mahan. Wilhelm II had read the American captain’s book
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
and was convinced that German greatness depended on control of the seas. “Germany,” the Kaiser declared in 1900, “must possess a battle fleet of such strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power’s own supremacy doubtful.” Since launching its crash naval construction program in 1898, Germany had set more and more ambitious targets as it sought to challenge Britain’s supremacy, eventually reaching a mighty seagoing force of sixty battleships and battle cruisers. The German High Seas Fleet was conceived on pure Mahanian lines: a series of battle squadrons each built around a core of seven or eight of the huge ships attended by flotillas of light cruisers and destroyers. Winston Churchill, shortly after taking office in 1911 as first lord of the Admiralty—the top civilian minister of the navy—warned that the Germans were building a sea force designed for “attack and for fleet action,” not merely for the defense of Germany’s overseas colonies and trade. The Germans, he concluded, were preparing “for a great trial of strength.” 16
    In 1901 Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the master architect of the risingimperial fleet, had bluffly declared, “Germany has no need for submarines.” 17 It was only in 1906 that the German navy acquired a single submarine for evaluation purposes, the last of the major naval powers to do so.
U-1
—the