Rear-Admiral Wilson (1842–1921) considered the submarine ‘a damned un-English weapon’, while the ‘U-boat peril’ was the only thing that Churchill claimed ever really frightened him during the Second World War. German submarines (the Unterseeboot, U-Boat) were to bring Britain to within weeks of starvation in the First World War and threatened her very survival in the Second. For Innes McCartney, the remains of U-boats wrecked on the seabed provide a subject of deep fascination and opportunities for marine exploration.
McCartney's book presents the results of his PhD in Nautical Archaeology. Collating the results of some 15 years of fieldwork and archival research, this volume presents an assessment of the records of wartime U-boat losses, compiled by allied naval intelligence, with observed wreck sites present on the seabed. The work is enhanced by analysis of some of the intelligence matters related to submarine tracking and attacks. McCartney is able to make quantitative assessments about the accuracy of allied intelligence based upon official ‘Lists’ compiled in 1919 and 1946, recorded methods of U-boat destruction and the reliability of U-boat identification. What is presented comprises a revised picture of the U-boat war and of wreck identification. The timing of the book's publication is serendipitous as it complements the range of new work associated with the First World War centenary.
Despite the book's broad title, the work only addresses a sub-set of German submarine losses of the two main modern conflicts in the English Channel: firstly, those lost between March 1915 (when the first U-boat, U8, was sunk in British waters) and the end of the First World War, and then from June 1944 to the end of the Second World War.
The selection of these seemingly narrow date ranges is largely a result of the choice of geographical study area, which comprises the wider English Channel between the Isles of Scilly and Dover. The wrecks are discussed in this context for the Channel was both a transit area and a battlefield for U-boats during the First World War until British minefields effectively closed the Dover Strait in August 1918. A similar minefield was laid in 1939, causing the Channel to be largely devoid of U-boat activity until D-Day in 1944.
The choice of study area obscures the wider picture of the U-boat war for although there is a predominance of First World War U-boat wrecks in the Channel, additional losses not covered by the research are present in the outer Thames Estuary and along the East Coast as far north as Northumberland. Further, two Second World War losses off the north of England, as well as Allied submarine losses, are not addressed at all. Students should note these opportunities for future research.
The development of naval intelligence from the unsophisticated ‘Room 40’ in 1914 to the professional Operational Intelligence Centre of the Second World War (both reliant on reading, de-coding and interpreting radio traffic) is addressed in the opening chapter along with the attendant submarine committee's classification of successful attacks on U-boats, which broadly ranged from Known Sunk to Improbable. It is on this classification of U-boat kills that McCartney bases his assessments of the accuracy of the two post-war ‘Lists’, seeking to reconcile the historical record of submarine losses with archaeological evidence on the seabed. Minefields are revealed to have accounted for a greater proportion of U-boat kills than previously thought. The subsequent chapters address the U-boat war and losses in chronological order with concluding remarks made about the accuracy of the historical records. Remarkably, 40 per cent of the wrecks recorded had no historical provenance.
Extensive use of Admiralty files held in the National Archives, coupled with specialist navigational information, provide the baseline historical narrative. Where these two sources provided positional information, GIS has been employed to create a spatial database of losses in order to interrogate historical claims made of successful attacks on U-boats. It is surprising that no reference is made to point-data and event records held by Historic England.
The historic record is assessed against the results of archaeological fieldwork, with each submarine having its own ‘wreck sheet’ setting out its likelihood of confirmed identification, position (although without reference to a geographic datum), orientation and photographs of key features. Herein lies McCartney's expertise: in the majority of cases he has been able to apply a positive identification to a submarine based upon his interrogation of source material and the application of his specialist knowledge of U-boat typological development. The presence of a rare pulley wheel, for example, enabled him to confirm the identity of U275 off Brighton, while a ‘mysterious non-standard hatched container’ on a foredeck may have enabled the identification of U1191 off Start Point in Devon. Another of McCartney's strengths has been to provide a narrative of each wreck inclusive of its manner of loss. Here, for example, we find that the crew of U8, which surfaced after becoming caught in the Dover net barrage in March 1915, was taken off by a Royal Navy destroyer only to be executed as pirates so as to deter other submariners. Immediate German reprisals on British POWs soon reversed this policy.
Exploring submarines is an emotive subject and a short section on the ethics of U-boat identification at the end of Chapter 1 reminds us that in the majority of cases the crews still lie within their steel tombs. McCartney's statement, however, falls short of addressing wider issues of military maritime graves, particularly as the research encompasses five U-boats designated under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. Reference to the general protection afforded to wrecks over 100 years old—inclusive now of First World War losses—offered by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage 2001 is also omitted.
Nevertheless, a key achievement of this research has been the revisions made to the actual positions of known U-boats. This will facilitate amendments to be made to national records, which will have a positive effect on heritage protection matters, either directly through statutory designation or indirectly through marine planning.
The archive of McCartney's work will be invaluable to other researchers and he has shown that a battlefield-wide approach to studying submarine losses can reveal new meanings that are missed when studying wrecks in isolation. Such ‘group value’—understanding individual wreck sites within a seascape context—will play a growing role in understanding the significance of these modern, but hugely important, heritage assets.
