I remain convinced that the best discussion of this topic is in John Terraine’s _The U-boat Wars_ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989) which covers the issue of German submarine warfare against Great Britain from 1916 to 1945 comprehensively. To paraphrase Terraine’s view, the Royal Navy delayed convoying out of a misplaced understanding of how to combat the U-boat, that countermeasures must be in the old style of guerre de course–hunt the raiders down. How can you hunt what you cannot find (at least not with the probabilities needed)? They eschewed what they regarded as a weaker form of warfare, ignoring the very power that probability and defense give the convoy over the single ship. Terraine lays this attitude at the door of Mahan, and though congruent perhaps with some things Mahan wrote, my own view of the matter is that these attitudes pre-dated Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett. Terraine emphasizes that they had the solution in front of their noses all along with the very low loss rates to uboats from troop convoys in both the Med and the Channel. In the interwar, and Terraine is supported here by Holger Herwig’s article in Murray and Millett’s _Military Innovation in the Interwar Period_, the British believed they could return to the good old days of hunting with the development of ASDIC, the proverbial silver bullet. It was a good torpedo warning device in 1939 but usually the flaming datum followed seconds after. Flaming datum is a US Navy term which refers to a ship hit by a submarine delivered torpedo.

I would only modify what Terraine says by emphasizing, and this has nothing to do with the convoy decision in the summer of 1917, that although he does point to the seriousness of the situation he tends to analyze away the actual threat to Britain’s food supply despite the fact that the Reichsmarine unterseekrieg had actually reached its tonnage goals. He is, of course, narrowly correct…but that is not the point.

Herbert Hoover in his report on the issue to the Wilson Administration emphasized that it was not Britain that was most at risk. The German subs had scored a singular coup in 1917 by sinking the Argentine/South American wheat harvest to a substantial degree. Hoover emphasized in his report that it was not the number of ships sunk but the fact that these ships were all loaded with grain, grain that was bound for ITALY and FRANCE and that without American grain relief there might bread riots within “3-4 weeks” in Italy and France. These data were buried for years but are now freely available in a number of archives including the Hoover Presidential Library. See: Hoover Library, Commerce Papers, Box 8, Naval Investigations 13 March 1920 [Sims] and testimony to the House Subcommittee on Naval Affairs. Page 118 of these transcripts especially emphasizes that Italy and France were worse off than the UK.

Hoover also criticizes the problems of coalition naval warfare due to “…the difficulty of getting teamwork out of a team made up of different nations.” I have posted this before so please excuse my writing it again.

John T. Kuehn, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Military History