Blackett's War Read Free Page A

agreed to were extraordinary and humiliating, a measure of the desperation that the swift collapse of Germany’s military situation had left her leaders facing. Fourteen articles of the Armistice dealt with the German navy. In addition to disarming all her warships and agreeing to have 10 battleships, 6 battle cruisers, 8 light cruisers, and 50 destroyers “of the most modern type” interned in neutral or Allied ports, Germany was to surrender outright “all submarines at present in existence … with armament and equipment complete.”
    Article 22 continued:
    Those that cannot put to sea shall be deprived of armament and equipment and shall remain under the supervision of the Allies and the United States. Submarines ready to put to sea shall be prepared to leave German ports immediately on receipt of wireless order to sail to the port of surrender, the remainder to follow as early as possible. The conditions of this Article shall be completed within fourteen days of the signing of the Armistice.
    Along with the horde of reporters, British submarine officers and men had been summoned from every port to be on hand to take charge of the enemy boats as they arrived. Accommodations at Parkeston, which included three moored depot ships, were packed far beyond capacity that evening of the 19th. The one “lady reporter” in the group was chivalrously offered the hotel billiard table as a bed for the night. 1
    A heavy fog shrouded the harbor the next morning as the destroyers
Melampus
and
Firedrake
, carrying the boarding parties and their attendant pack of press hounds, got under way at 7 a.m. heading for the point where the surrender was to take place; it was the southern end of the shipping channel known as the Sledway, about eight miles east-northeast of Harwich. A British airship droned out of the mist and passed to the north, quickly vanishing again in the fog. Then a few minutes before 10 a.m. a British lightcruiser suddenly came into sight in the distance, then two German transports flanked by more British warships.
    And then there they were: a line of unmistakable, long thin hulls breaking the dark surface of the water, topped by domed conning towers, proceeding in straggling order. Two airships and three flying boats kept a continuous watch over the procession, passing and repassing low over the enemy boats as they came on slowly toward the rendezvous point. Lieutenant Stephen King-Hall, a British submarine torpedo officer, groped to find words to capture the incredulity he felt as he witnessed the scene from aboard the
Firedrake
: the dangerous and reclusive predator he and his comrades had hunted and feared and loathed, now meekly chivvied along like a few tame sheep. “Try and imagine what you would feel like,” he wrote, “if you were told to go to Piccadilly at 10 a.m. and see twenty man-eating tigers walk up from Hyde Park Corner and lie down in front of the Ritz to let you cut their tails off and put their leads on—and it was really so.” 2
    A signal was given to the transports to anchor, and one by one the line of twenty U-boats joined them under the guns of the British destroyers. Motor launches came alongside the
Firedrake
and the
Melampus
, and the British boarding crews, two or three officers and fifteen men for each U-boat, scrambled aboard. Not sure what to expect, the officers all carried sidearms. “We were prepared for any eventuality except that which actually took place,” recalled King-Hall. “We were not prepared to find the Huns behaving for once as gentlemen.”
    King-Hall’s boarding of
U-90
went by the book, with punctilious correctness. The German officers saluted; the salutes were duly returned; the German captain presented the signed terms of surrender—all equipment intact and in working order, all ballast tanks blown, torpedoes on board but disarmed, no booby traps—and the submarine’s officers seemed almost pathetically eager to be helpful, offering explanations of the