U-boats off America

The story of the Deutschland and Bremen in 1916

I wrote recently about a Great White shark that harassed the coast of New Jersey in July 1916 and that one of the official lines was that one of the victims lost his foot to the propeller of a U-boat. This got me thinking about U-boat operations off the coast of the United States during the First World War. This wasn’t something I knew a lot about but I’ve been doing some digging and here is Part one of the results.

There are two famous events as well as developments in U-boat design through 1915-16, one the dispatch of two civilian merchant U-boats, Deutschland and Bremen and the other of the actions of the U-53 under Kapitanleutnant Rose which I’ll be posting next week.

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The merchant U-boat Deutschland

One of the big problems Germany faced was the Royal Navy blockade robbing them of much needed raw materials and foodstuffs. The Germans looked at ways to try to break the blockade with cruiser warfare, counter blockades with U-boats operating in the North Sea and approaches to the Channel, lone raiders such as Mowe and Wolf and two long range U-boats.

The idea of trans-Atlantic U-boats was first looked at by Alfred Lohmann, chair of Lohmann & co. Export-import, he was also the president of Bremen’s Chamber of Commerce in 1914. Originally it was believed that the Navy’s U-boats could be used for such a purpose but there were two drawbacks with that.

The first was that U-boats class as warships for the purposes of neutrality and there were restrictions and issues with them going into neutral ports, especially with a time limit for being in port.

Why not use one of the many German merchant ships trapped in ports or charter a vessel to bring the needed cargo out to sea where it can be transferred? Well that is very problematic because you need calm weather and seas and a lot of time to manually carry cargo from the ship to the U-boat which is dangerous as well as both vessels being vulnerable on the surface should a British warship come upon them. There is also a question of the range of the 1914 U-boats and whether they could get across the Atlantic. Otto Hersing’s journey to the Mediterranean from Heligoland was an awesome feat and nearly didn’t pay off so regular journeys to the American continents would be a difficult journey. The attempt by a smaller Austrian submarine under von Trapp to get from Pola to Corfu led to most of the crew falling ill from the conditions of being trapped in the U-boat and breathing bad air.

There is also the question of capacity as military U-boats are not designed for carrying vast amounts of cargo and instead a move was being made to make specific cargo carrying U-boats. Lohmann proposed this idea to the State secretary of the Interior in September 1915 and said if the Reich could fund the venture he would use his abilities to see it done. The German government and Navy agreed it was a great idea but they wanted to make it clear it was a civilian venture carried out by civilians for civilians. This would give the U-boats a certain amount of protection from international naval rules and also the Royal Navy could not attack a civilian ship without following the cruiser rules.

Finances were gained from Lohmann’s business, Norddeutscher Lloyd and the Deutsche Bank and it would be this new freight carrying submarine company which would build the vessels and organise the acquisition of cargo for collection in the neutral ports as well as the sale of cargo taken over. Financially the German Government would guarantee the investment for a 5% return on all profits and Lohmann and Norddeutscher promised to return all profits over and above that percentage. This agreement was so secret that the head of the Naval cabinet, Admiral Georg Alexander von Muller, a key aide to the Kaiser, had no knowledge of the project until after the Deutschland’s first voyage.

Lohmann first approached the Weser AG works in Bremen to look at the possibility of building long range U-boat trading vessels and the company were enthusiastic of the possibility but they said the development of engines for such a craft would take them longer than Lohmann could wait with a new U-boat being ready by September 1916 some ten months later.

Krupp had also been thinking about such a scheme and had considered making a trans-Atlantic U-boat and gifting it to the Reich on the proviso that it be used to bring back Nickel from the US. They designed a prototype that could carry 700 tons and believed it could be in service by April 1916. Vulcan-Werft based in Stettin had also found out about the project, somehow, and they decided to up Krupp’s offer and said they could build four based on their previous larger mine laying models.

On 15th October 1915 Krupp, Norddeutscher, Lohmann and Wesser AG sat down to hammer out the details and originally Wesser AG would build the Bremen and Krupp the Deutschland but this was altered to Krupp building one with their own finances and one for Lohmann and Norddeutscher.

The Deutschland and Bremen were built at the Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft in Flensburg, both vessels were 65 metres long with a top speed of 10 knots on the surface and 6.7 knots submerged and no weapons at all. They were strictly civilian vessels and it was hoped that they could pass unseen past the British blockade.The two submarines had a total capacity of 700 tons, not a vast amount but there were more on the slips under construction and if a fleet of these submarines could bring even a trickle of supplies in it would take some of the pressure off the German homefront.

Krupp used readily available components to speed the production along including taking from capitalship projects such as the diesel generators from the Bayern class SMS Saschen and proposed battle-cruiser Gneisenau which did cause some issues in their use such as they could only go backwards if they used their electric motors as the diesels were un-reversable. There were other issues with the weight displacement and that it was difficult for the U-boats to submerge especially when they held a cargo of rubber inside. The crews would have to load the silver and nickel inside to add weight and the rubber outside the pressure hull. The Deutschland was completed in five months, so swift that a crew hadn’t even been hired or trained for her!

The Admiralstab were so impressed by the sea trials of these vessels and their long range that they ordered six similar vessels for themselves