Abstract
At first glance, this book considers the history and exploits of one German submarine during the Great War, with the additional twist of the activities of the Baltimore sabotage cell run by German military intelligence included. While the Baltimore sabotage operation and the cargo submarine, the U-Deutschland, were separate operations, there was shared knowledge and goals which creates a degree of overlap between both operations. While the sections on the sabotage operations are not always interwoven entirely successfully with the history of the U-Deutschland, this study provides nonetheless a fascinating and revealing account of how Imperial Germany sought to overcome the huge challenges posed by the British blockade. There is also a chapter on the U-Bremen, another cargo submarine, which was lost at sea with all crew members in the autumn of 1916.
While the main focus of the book is on the U-Deutschland, this should not create the impression that this is a narrow study, written to satisfy the desire of submarine buffs for technical details. The case of the first of a small fleet of cargo U-boats is remarkable for the insights it offers into German sabotage in the United States, the changing attitudes among the American public towards Imperial Germany during the Great War, and the controversies relating to American neutrality, sovereignty and the law of the sea which the U-Deutschland provoked. The Germans were able to use the first arrival of the Deutschland to place pressure on the Americans to demonstrate that they were acting as a neutral power: indeed, on 14 July 1916, the Navy Neutrality Board confirmed that the U-boat was a merchant vessel. But this decision did not satisfy the British or the French, since submarine merchant vessels thus far had not been explicitly written into international law. Among the difficulties were that it would have been impossible to distinguish between an aggressive and a merchant U-boat at sea, it was unlikely that a U-boat could be stopped and searched to ascertain whether it was carrying war-related materials, while the possibility of its later conversion to a torpedo and gun-equipped vessel could not be ruled out.
Messimer is especially proficient in disentangling propaganda from the actual truth: much which was published during and immediately after the war was intended to cover up some of the deficiencies of the cargo submarines. The German naval authorities were anxious to conceal the route taken by the U-Deutschland and the fact that it was relatively slow. They also sought to highlight that it had not been built for warlike purposes, employing the terms ‘undersea freighter’ and ‘commercial undersea boat’. At the same time, the return of the U-Deutschland to Bremen on 25 August 1916, after its first successful trip, was a major victory for wartime morale because it seemed to suggest that the British blockade could be broken. But the U-Deutschland was not simply a vehicle of propaganda. It was at the centre of a battle in the German High Command over how to prosecute the war at sea. So long as the cargo submarines offered a prospect of circumventing the British blockade, there was a chance that an all-out submarine campaign could be avoided. Diplomatic and technical complications, as well as the loss of the U-Bremen, together with the deteriorating situation on the home front, finally silenced the opponents of unrestricted submarine warfare.
The final three chapters describe the conversion of the U-Deutschland to the U-155, which was equipped with torpedoes and deck guns, and its three combat patrols in the area of the Azores, with orders to sink as many ships as possible. Given the technical problems it laboured under after its conversion from a cargo submarine, it succeeded on its first patrol in sinking a reasonable quantity of shipping, reaching respectable rates of tonnage sunk in comparison with other U-boats. The first mission (23 May–5 September 1917) saw 21 ships sunk, totalling 52,370 GRT, the second mission (14 January–4 May 1918) resulted in 13 ships sunk, a total of 26,747 GRT, while the third mission (11 August–13 November 1918) saw it sink eight vessels, which added up to 18,575 GRT. The declining performance of the U-155 was, of course, at least in part a result of the improving convoy system employed by Allied ships. In these chapters, the author is particularly authoritative on the technical problems experienced by the U-155, most notably the fact it was too slow, but also that the mountings for the deck guns were placed under such stress by the recoil that accuracy was reduced each time a gun was fired.
The style of the account is narrative and largely chronological, which makes a great deal of sense in explaining how events developed and why the activities of the Baltimore sabotage cell intersected at times with the two voyages of the U-Deutschland to the United States. What is particularly commendable is the way in which the author successfully unpacks the significance of the U-Deutschland in the complexities surrounding United States neutrality for much of the war, the at times strained relations between Britain and America, and German efforts to avoid antagonizing the United States while attempting to counteract the punishing blockade which saw the country gradually pushed towards starvation by late 1917.
The Baltimore Sabotage Cell is extremely well-researched, with the author making good use of material from captured German naval records, material from the Bureau of Investigation, files of the State Department, newspaper reports, to name just some of the sources; needless to say, he demonstrates as well a thorough mastery of the secondary literature. The only real gripe which this reviewer had is that the title is slightly misleading, since around two-thirds of the book is really about the U-Deutschland and its later incarnation as the U-155. This book can be, nonetheless, strongly recommended because it combines so many different aspects of the war at sea during the First World War into a highly readable and illuminating narrative for both the non-specialist and the naval historian alike.