Anti-submarine warriors?

One of the great things about writing historical fiction is discovering odd sets of facts, often buried in the archives, that capture both the desperation and the madness of a given time. Often, as the cliche goes, you just can’t make this stuff up. Here is an account of how the Royal Navy attempted to fight back against German submarines in World War I using trained seagulls and hammers. The schemes worked about as well as one might expect.

For most of World War I, the Royal Navy had nothing to counter the threat of the German U-boats. The British had imposed a total naval blockade of German ports in an attempt to starve them out of the war. The Germans had responded in kind by mounting unrestricted submarine warfare targeting the merchant shipping providing Britain with essential food and supplies. Whichever country’s blockade could starve the enemy first could win the war,

The problem was that the British lacked the tools and technology to fight the German submarines. On the surface, submarines were difficult to spot as they ride low in the water, Once submerged, they were almost invisible.  The only thing that could give them away was the slender periscope protruding above the surface, which was difficult to spot at any distance,

Hydrophones were primitive and largely ineffective. ASDIC, later known as sonar, wouldn’t be developed until after the end of the war. Depth charges, which proved to be an effective weapon, weren’t available until 1916 and still required knowing where the submarine was, which remained, too often, a mystery.

Admiral Sir Frederick Samuel Inglefield had an idea; several ideas actually, which were brilliantly innovative is not necessarily practical. Inglefield had had a long and distinguished career in the Royal Navy, serving in various posts including as Fourth Sea Lord, By the time World War I had broken out, he was sidelined as commander of auxiliary patrol forces.

One of the admiral’s ideas was to use seagulls to identify German submarines operating at periscope depth. Supported by the British Board of Invention and Research, the idea was to feed wild seagulls from dummy periscopes, so the birds would associate periscopes as a place to feed. Thus, the sight of these birds flocking around the periscopes of the enemy would let the British Navy know a U-boat was in the vicinity. It was an interesting idea but the gulls turned out to be more interested in eating the fish than in being trained to fly around periscopes.

Admiral Inglefield took the idea one step further. In addition to identifying the location of the submarine, if the gulls could be trained to defecate on the periscope, the submarine would be blinded.  It was never clear how gulls could be trained to poop specifically on periscopes. Nevertheless, a gull training facility was built in Poole Harbour, but the idea was still in development when the arrival of US destroyers in 1917 made it superfluous, 

A second, more direct approach to attacking subs involved canvas sacks and hammers. Because it involved British sailors, who are much easier to train than seagulls, it appeared slightly more likely to succeed.

Admiral Inglefield was in command of a small armada of patrol craft. He proposed equipping each with a canvas sack and a large hammer. If a submarine’s periscope was spotted the launch would approach the periscope. One sailor would put the sack over the periscope while another sailor would attempt to break the periscope lense with the hammer. Not surprisingly, the approach was never tested in combat.

There were also proposals to use trained sea lions to locate submarines and also to dump large quantities of bicarbonate of soda, which would notionally cause the submarine to float to the, in contravention of Archimedes Law. 

Suffice it to say that while trained seagulls, sea lions, sacks and hammers may have shown imagination, they were not practical techniques of fighting U-boats.  The U-boat onslaught continued, until by 1917, German submarines had sunk roughly one-third of the world’s merchant fleet. 

The arrival of US destroyers in 1917, less than a month after the United States declared war on Germany, coincided with the British initiating merchant ship convoys. The convoy system finally mitigated the damage done by unrestricted submarine warfare. The U-boat threat didn’t vanish, but it became manageable.