Blackett's War Read Free Page B

operation of the boat and its gear. The same scene was being repeated all along the line. “My Hun,” remarked one of the British officers back in Harwich that evening, “might have been trying to sell me the boat, the blighter tried to be so obliging.”
    As the submarines raised anchor the British crews ran up the white flag for the final transit into port. A strict order had been issued by the port commander that there would be no cheering or other demonstrations, and as the captured U-boats passed the ships in the harbor, crowded with spectators,they were greeted by silence. By 4 p.m. they were moored to buoys at the head of the harbor (at what “the reporters now say we call ‘U-boat Avenue,’ ” King-Hall sarcastically noted); a motor launch came alongside and the Germans, who had meanwhile changed into civilian garb that made them look more like peacetime caricatures of German tourists, green felt hat and all, than officers of a fierce and proud militarist state, were told to gather their belongings and get aboard. The launch took them to one of the British destroyers, which delivered them to the German transports for the trip back home, without ever having set foot on British soil.
    Over the next eleven days the scene was repeated in daily succession as ninety-four more U-boats surrendered at Harwich, all without incident. Some of the German sailors inquired pathetically of the boarding crews if they thought they might be able to find work as merchant seamen in China or Japan, if Germans were now unwelcome anywhere closer to home. Two refused to return to Germany and insisted on staying in England, where they hoped to find “work and good food.” Many of the surrendering boats were commanded by junior and plainly nervous young officers, their regular captains apparently having refused to make the humiliating voyage; others flew the red flag of the revolutionaries who had seized parts of the German fleet in the waning days of the war, their captains elected by the crews and holding commissions signed by the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Committee; in other boats the crews sullenly refused to obey orders of their regular officers except when it was clear that the order would be backed up by the British officer on board. Most, especially the older men who were members of the naval reserve and had been merchant sailors before the war, seemed simply relieved that it was over, and bade farewell to their boats with dry eyes and no apparent regrets. 3
    In December 1918 the Allied Naval Commission discovered 62 additional seaworthy U-boats and another 149 still under construction at German bases and yards and ordered the immediate surrender of any that could sail or be towed and the destruction of the rest. The German government was warned that failure to turn over all of its U-boats intact would be answered by the Allies with the permanent occupation of its island naval base of Heligoland. The captured fleet, 176 boats in the end, was parceled out among the victors, most going to Britain and France, with token specimens awarded to the other Allies; Italy received 10, Japan 7, the United States 6, Belgium 2. 4
    One of the behemoths of the German U-boat fleet—the “supersubmarine”
Deutschland
, originally constructed as a blockade-runner witha cargo capacity of 750 tons—was scheduled to be broken up. But at the urging of members of Parliament it was instead towed to the Thames in October 1919 and exhibited to raise money for the King’s Fund for Sailors. “Poetic justice,” one member of Parliament declared with satisfaction. 5
    But the real satisfaction to those who had battled this new undersea menace had come four months earlier, with the German signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Among its hundreds of detailed military stipulations, specifying everything from the maximum number of officers permitted in the headquarters of a cavalry division (15) to the number of rounds of ammunition that