Notes on contributors
Commander Jeff Tall OBE RN, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, UK.
Commander Jeff Tall is the Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a post he has held since August 1994 when he retired from the Royal Navy. A submariner for twenty eight years, he has served all over the world and commanded four submarines: HMS Olympus, HMS Finwhale, HMS Churchill and, finally, the nuclear powered Polaris Missile submarine, HMS Repulse. He served as Admiral Sandy Woodward’s submarine staff officer during the Falklands Conflict in 1982. He was co-author, with the naval historian Paul Kemp, of HM Submarines in Camera, he wrote the historical element of the CD-Rom The RN Submarine Service - Past Present and Future, produced jointly with the Royal Naval School, which is available to the general public.
Recommended reading
Carr, William Guy, By Guess and By God (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1930)
Chapman, Paul, Submarine Torbay (London: Robert Hale, 1989)
Chatterton, E. Keble, Amazing Adventure (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1935)
Dickison, Arthur, Crash Dive (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, in association with The Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1999)
Edwards, Kenneth, We Dive at Dawn (London: Rich & Cowan, 1939)
Mackenzie, Hugh, Sword of Damocles (Gosport: Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1995)
McGeoch, Ian, An affair of Chances (London: Imperial War Museum, 1991)
Padfield, Peter, War Beneath the Sea – Submarine Conflict 1939–1945 (London: John Murray, 1995)
Shankland, Peter and Hunter, Anthony, Dardanelles Patrol (London: Collins, 1964)
Wilson, Michael, Baltic Assignment – British Submarines in Russia 1914–1919 (London: Leo Cooper)
Wingate, John, The Fighting Tenth (London: Leo Cooper, 1991)
Young, Edward, One of our Submarines (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997)
Tony Lane
The development of submarine commerce warfare in the First World War and its extensive and systematic application in the Second World War ensured that in both wars merchant seamen were the only civilians to be killed in large numbers by military action: 14,679 in the First War, 28,000 in the Second. Where in each war the casualty rates suffered by merchant seamen were higher than those for Royal Navy seamen, in 1939–45 merchant seamen actually had a higher death rate than any of the armed forces. The wars produced a few epic encounters between lightly armed merchant ships and warships, and frequent examples of extraordinarily resourceful feats of survival in lifeboats and the nursing homeward of seriously damaged ships. Of the latter, there was the extraordinary case of the San Demetrio. Abandoned by her crew, then reboarded by those in a lifeboat unnoticed by a rescue ship, fires were extinguished and makeshift steering organised. With engines restarted, the San Demetrio limped home with her cargo of petrol – to be celebrated in a full-length feature film and a Government publication, The Saga of San Demetrio, by F. Tennyson Jesse (HMSO, 1942).
Seafarers could hardly have been unaware of their critical role in bringing in food and raw materials, or insensitive to the risks they ran; neither their exploits nor their crucial role in the supply chain seems in any way to have affected their everyday behaviour. They did not set aside their habitual independent-minded attitudes to shipboard discipline and become ‘respectable’ and orderly patriotic citizens. In both wars, merchant seamen unquestioningly adjusted to testing circumstances, but in their everyday actions they insisted on being themselves. They were intensely proud of their occupational culture, and at the heart of this fine mesh of norms and values was a profound belief in the legitimacy of resistance to breaches of customary rules of justice and fair play, and entitlement, when opportunity offered, to a ‘good run ashore’. These beliefs were not set aside in the exceptional conditions of war, and merchant seafarers could therefore seem to be both heroic and a disorderly rabble. They were neither. They were themselves.
Ships, crews and war
Only 20 years separated the end of one war and the beginning of the next. It was therefore a relatively simple matter for those administering the direction and the organisation of shipping in the Second World War to draw upon the experience of the First. The Ministry of Shipping, which did not appear until 1916 in the Great War, was operative in 1939 just six weeks after the outbreak of war, and had key senior officials who had held similar posts in 1918.1 In 1939, as previously, this new ministry had overall control of the destinations and the cargoes carried, although day-to-day technical and personnel management of ships was left in the hands of the shipping companies. Military protection was of course the Admiralty’s responsibility, and here, as in commercial operations, the Royal Navy was in 1939 much better prepared. Where in 1914 the Admiralty had been obliged to use the Lloyd’s insurance market’s global network of agents to advise shipmasters on avoidance of normal routes and on ‘blackout’ precautions, in 1939 the master needed only to open ‘Envelope Z’. Previously lodged in his safe, it contained a single sheet giving the ship its secret call-sign and instructions on radio silence and blackout procedures. The Admiralty had also been providing training courses for merchant ships’ deck officers since 1937 on the likely demands of war, and more than two-thirds of officers had attended them by September 1939. Gunnery training for officers began in the summer of 1938, and for ratings from early in 1939.
In the First War merchant ships only began to be equipped with defensive armament (stern-mounted 4-inch or 12-pounder guns) from 1916, and the typical gun crew was led by a recalled, retired naval gunner and assisted by volunteers from among the crew. In 1939 guns that were often relics from the Great War were quickly brought out of store and fitted between voyages when port-time and labour availability allowed. By 1943 every ship was armed with at least one large gun at the stern and lighter anti-aircraft weapons, and gadgets such as anti-aircraft kites. The deliveries in increasing numbers of American-built Liberty ships with purpose-built gun platforms and modern quick-firing guns from early 1943 finally provided the ultimate in armed merchant ships. By this time merchant ships were also being provided with professional gunners. Early in the Second World War gunners, as in the First, were either a mixture of recalled naval professionals and volunteers or wholly recruited from among trained crew members. By 1944 there were 24,000 naval gunners aboard merchant ships and a further 14,000 army gunners who were members of the specially formed Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery and universally known as DEMS gunners.
Britain’s dependence on the ability freely to import great volumes of foodstuffs and raw materials was well enough known. And it was naturally better known in 1939 after the experience of 1914–18. Nevertheless, in 1939 the British merchant fleet’s carrying capacity was 8 per cent smaller than in 1914, while both the British population and its per capita consumption of commodities had increased. For example, between 1914 and 1939 it was estimated that Britain’s weekly consumption of sugar went up from 37,000 tons to 48,000 tons and grain from 27,000 tons to 38,000 tons, increases respectively of 22 and 29 per cent. The widened gap between the supply and demand for shipping services had been met by a growing dependence upon the shipping services of other nations, especially Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. Ships of neutral nations had of course been important carriers of British imports in 1914–18. In the Second War the ships and crews of the neutral nations,