The Story of Our Submarines

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John Bowers QC. The Story of Our Submarines

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There has naturally been a great deal of ink spilled during the War on the subject of the U-boat. The British Submarines have worked unseen and unheard of. Occasionally a few official lines have appeared in the newspapers about them, but the very nature of the work they have been doing has precluded any divulging of their activity. With the permission of the Admiralty I am about to speak now of some of the work they have done, and to give their own reports describing some of the many occasions on which they have been in contact with the enemy.

On August 4, 1914, we had in our Submarine Service the following boats: 9 E class, 8 D class, 37 C class, 10 B class.

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By the nature of the German strategy our lines of design were indicated. The chief type we needed were scouts – in other words, patrol boats. We built these in considerable numbers, for the several types of patrol boats we diverged into were capable of doing any of several things. They could do the Heligoland Bight patrol, attacking the enemy if met with, and reporting to the C. – in-C. what they saw on their patrols; they could go out into the Atlantic to hunt U-boats on the traffic lanes, or they could go to the Mediterranean to work in the Adriatic. They were the general-utility craft of the Submarine Navy.

The mine-layers were of the patrol boat type, getting larger as the War went on, but always with the torpedo-tubes (reduced in number) built into them to allow them to become normal submarines when a chance arose.

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