THE WAR BY WATER. 
THE SUBMARINE POSITION & THE ^BLOCKADE." 
By FRED T. JANE. 
NOTE.— This Arlkle his been submitted to the Prorii Bureau, which does not object to the publication as censored, and takes no 
responsibility for (lie correctness oi the siatemenls. 
THE moat iinportant incident during the last v/etk 
is uot one that at first sight would appear lo have 
any particular significance outside tlie operalion 
itself. It is some long time since we first sent aero- 
planes to drop bombs on submarines building or 
being put together at Zeebrugge, and the work came into the 
category of " doing damage " rather than aught else. 
Of late, however, aerial attack on submarines has been 
resumed with considerable assiduity, and there is every 
reason to believe tliat what appears to the public merely as 
" another daring air raid " is really part of a scheme of high 
general strategy. Indeed, it is not impossible that v/e are 
witnessing tiie dawn of an entirely new era in naval warfare. 
Before the war there was a somewhat general inipression 
that aircraft had to a great e-ftent neutralised submarines. 
Theories varied in d«l:iil; but in all the main idea was that 
submarines would easily be detected from th'; sky and then as 
easily destroyed by bomb-dropping unless they hastily buried 
themselves many fathoms down or were protected by aerial 
consorts. Wo also heard a great deal of the ideal combination 
of aircraft and submarines, but to all intents and purposes 
we have seen nothing of the .sort. 
On the other hand, two factors have by now made them- 
selves abundantly clear. Of those the first is that, yirni the 
command vf the sea, the sni.all craft of the superior Power 
can do a great deal in the way of eliminating submarines — 
how much we shall have to wait until the end of the war to 
learn. However, the mere fact suffices. 
The second factor is that, given the command of the air, 
submarines building or lying at their bases can be attacked 
and destroyed. This last, however, may be merely a tempo- 
rary phase, at any rate, so far as building is concerned, be- 
cause bombproof sheds offer an obvious remedy unless the 
air power available be sufficient to prevent the construction 
of such safeties, or they can be destroyed by gnn fire from 
big ships in bombardments like that of Zeebrugge some 
months ago. 
Neither factor sesms to have presented itself to the 
German mind, any moi-e than a third factor, which I shall 
discuss later — that of personnel. 
Details of new German submarine construction are, so 
far as the public is concerned, necessarily hard to come by; 
they arc naturally only approximately to be arrived at, and 
then only by piecing together odd scraps of information 
derived from neutrals. We, of course, know that on the 
outbreak of war Germany had from eight to twelve sub- 
marines in various stages of construction. These can hardly 
have sufficed to replace losses which may run to anytlung 
between fifteen and twenty. Some of the reported ramminfs 
by merchant ships may be duplications of the same story, or 
the rammed submarine may have merely been injured some- 
what and not sunk. None the less, considerable losses must 
have been sustained, and, one way and another, the available 
force of German submarines at the present moment must be, 
relatively speaking, inconsiderable, especially when wa 
remember that they have the Baltic to attend to as well as 
onr waters. With things as they were German submarines 
would have gradually died out, just as the commerce raiding 
cruisers did. 
But — judging from the reports of neutrals— there i.s 
every reason to believe that on the outbreak of war Germany 
suddenly laid down from fifty to sixty submarines. This has 
been so often reported, and reported from so many different 
sources, that it may safely be assumed as a fact. In addition, 
the improvising of submarine building yards on the Belgian 
coast suggests that all the ])rivate yards of Germany are also 
building submarines. 
Nov/, the average time for construction of a submarina 
under normal conditions is anything from a year upwards. 
But in circumstances of pressure nine months is a quite 
possible and reasonable period, and the war has now lasted 
nearly nine mouths. Therefore, we may expect a very early 
and large mnnerical increase in German submarines. 
Now, this means that on the outbreak of war Germany 
suddenly altered her naval policy, her usual programme 
having been six boats a year. Why she made this'^sufjden 
change niust necessarily be a matter of surmise. We can if 
we will attribute it to a pre war belief that the British P^mpira 
would not be co-operating with France and Russia. Or ws 
can attribute it to a sudden realisation of the impotence of a 
few big ships against many — a sudden falliug-away from 
German eyes of the scales of convention. Yet again the easa 
with which in rapid succession our Vnthfindtr and the three 
C/essies were submarined may have had much to do with ths 
sudden conviction of Germany th.it her future, instead of 
lying on the water, lay under the water. 
Possibly all three causes operated. In any case, how- 
ever, the net result is of the nafciire of a new era, a vast 
increase (for as soon as one boat is launched another appear* 
to be laid down) in Hie number of submarines and a decision 
to regard the submarine as the principal warship for moderm 
requirements. 
Now, where numbers are concerned this is perfectly 
feasible; but v/here personnel is concerned the matter assumes 
a somewhat different aspect. So far as men go, submarine 
crews can probably be trained in.side a month. Their duties 
are mainly nsechanical. 
With submarine officers, however, the state of affairs is 
totally different. On the officers eveiything depends, and a 
semi-trained subuiarine officer is rather worse than useless. 
It takes a good two years or the better part of that time to 
train an officer to command a submarine efficiently. On his 
nerve, skill, endurance, and judgment everything depends to 
a degree of which the general public (and, for that matter, a 
fair number of senior officers) have no conception whatever. 
When war broke out Germany had available .somewhere 
about one hundred trained submarine officers at the outside. 
Of these, cue way and another, she must have lost anything 
from one-third to a half, and none of those officers whom she 
may have trained in the interim can yet be suitable for effec- 
tive command. 
So far as war efficiency is concerned, we may take it, 
therefore, that the numerical increase and the effective in- 
crease will not be at all one and the same thing. It will 
nece.-:sarily mean the scrapping of all the older boats, or else 
relegating them to training service. It will also be necessary 
to promote to the command of large boats officers from small 
boats and officers who have been second in command of boats, 
and who — to a certain extent — are, therefore, still " under 
training." 
Consequently, if fifty new submarines be added to the 
German Fleet in the course of the next few weeks, it will 
not mean fifty boats added to the effective force of tliosa 
already exi.sting. It will, however, mean the substitution 
of newer and greatly improved boats for older ones, and here 
our aerial raids to check new construction perform a special 
function. Germany, having failed in her challenge to us on 
the sea, is now about to fight for the under-sea mastery. 
The recent air raids on submarine bases indicate that 
our Admiralty is fully alive to the situation and determined 
to leave no stone unturned in maintaining our submarine 
superiority. Speculations as to all the measures being taken 
are undesirable; but no harm is done by drawing attention to 
the fact that when this war started wo had tv/o or three sub- 
marines to every one possessed by Germany and a much more 
considerable building programme in hand. This naturally 
implies a far larger number of trained and efficient officers — 
that is to say, humanly speaking, we possess as heavy a 
margin for the new warfare as we did for the old. 
It is true that in the new warfare in which Germany has 
elected to seek naval salvation there is the problem of how 
submarines are to fight each other. Unless both sides are 
determined on a surface fight nothing is to be done save by 
surprises, which of necessity are likely to be few and far 
between. But, as 1 pointed out last week, the superior Power 
has the advantage of being able to adopt the offensive, and 
the net result of Germany's great submarine move will prob- 
ably be that we learn to attack her in ways that else we might 
not have deemed possible. 
In the wanton slaughter of non-combatants in merchant 
ships von Tirpitz is probably training our Navy to adapt 
itself to the new era in naval warfare; indeed, the real net 
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