Over the longer run, the Allies' terrifying experience with the submarine
in 1917 enriched the warfare of the future. Submarine development continued
among all the main belligerents in the two decades after the war. The
potential of that weapon was now evident, and when war broke out again
in 1939, the British and German submarines of the day went into action
immediately and with crushing effect. The Germans made the biggest
headlines. The sinking of the battleship Royal Oak early on the morning of
October 14, 1939, when a German U-boat penetrated the defenses at Scapa
Flow, was Jellicoe's nightmare of 1914 turned into grim reality. But Berlin
made its greatest commitment of underwater forces to snap the "Atlantic
Bridge" connecting Britain and the Western Hemisphere in 1942; it was the
linear descendant of their earlier effort in 1917. Here Admiral Karl Doenitz,
a veteran of World War I, initiated wolf pack tactics in an effort to counter
the defensive power of convoys. This technique had been used briefly in
May 1918; it involved several U-boats striking simultaneously at the ships
of a single convoy. At that time, the tactic failed, partly because British
intelligence learned of the danger and rerouted vulnerable vessels.
Allied countermeasures also drew on the experience of 1917-1918. The
British government applied the same system of food rationing and promotion
of agriculture in the second war that they used in the first. And the
military countermeasures likewise took up the earlier pattern. Convoys were
the norm from the start of the war, and aerial patrols played a key part in
harassing and sinking the submarine. The depth charges and location
devices, such as sonar, were modem versions of those tools applied or tried
in the earlier war.
Nonetheless, during the interwar period, navies continued to center their
strategy and building programs on the battleship. In a plea to the United
States secretary of the navy, the navy's General Board wrote in August 1937:
"The battleship is the basic instrument of naval warfare. ... An orderly
program of replacement must be instituted ... to prevent our battle line
strength from falling to a third rate status." The plea was based on concern
that the United States would be left behind as Germany, Japan, France, and
Italy were busy building their great ships of the line.
It took World War II and the lessons of both the submarine and the aircraft
carrier to change this emphasis. For example, when the United States joined
the war against Japan in December 1941, both belligerents made the
submarine a key weapon in the Pacific. The ability of the United States Navy
to cut off naval traffic to and from the home islands of Japan by the late
spring of 1945 was the dream of World War I submariners transformed into
successful reality. The subsequent history of the submarine, now nuclearpowered,
has made it the premier weapon in naval warfare.
World History
