America’s U-Boats: Terror Trophies of World War I
Chris Dubbs. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 206 pp. Appen. Biblio. Illus. $24.95.
Reviewed by Colonel John J. Abbatiello, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
In America’s U-Boats, Chris Dubbs tells the important story of America’s use of surrendered German submarines as tools for the post–World War I Victory Bond drive and to support U.S. Navy recruitment. An administrator at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, Dubbs is a seasoned nonfiction author who employs superb prose to tell this story of America’s fascination with an enemy tool of war. It’s a great tale of daring German and American submariners, the employment of innovative technology, and a curious American public.
Dubbs begins his monograph with an account of German submarines operating in U.S. waters prior to America’s formal entry as a belligerent. Wartime Germany designed the Deutschland, a large submarine freighter, to run the British blockade and open German trade to neutral nations such as the United States. The American public welcomed the 213-foot Deutschland to its shores during her first visit in July 1916. The freighter brought dyes, medicines, and gemstones from Germany, and transported nickel, rubber, and tin back to her homeland. A few months later, U-53, a combat U-boat, visited Newport, Rhode Island for a few hours and then proceeded to torpedo Canadian and Dutch shipping in international waters off the U.S. coast. After America’s entry as a combatant, a number of U-boats conducted war patrols off the eastern seaboard, but these cruises were minimally effective. In addition to these interesting vignettes, Dubbs also provides an overview of both German U-boat tactics and Anglo-American countermeasures during the Great War.
The author then moves on to the essence of the story—the German surrender of 176 U-boats after the November 1918 Armistice and the subsequent acquisition of 6 U-boats as prizes by the U.S. Navy. The six U-boats—including three large “fleet” boats, two short-range coastal boats of the UB class, and one UC-class mine-laying submarine—would tour the nation, including cities on the Great Lakes as well as the East and West coasts. In the spring of 1919, 12 naval officers and 120 enlisted sailors arrived in Harwich, England, to make essential repairs on the neglected—and in some cases, sabotaged—U-boats and prepare them for the transatlantic voyage to America.
According to Dubbs, government officials had learned from Liberty Bond drives that captured military equipment “was a simple but successful formula” to connect the public to the war effort. In addition to flying demonstrations of surrendered German aircraft and trainloads of other captured war materiel, the final Victory Loan campaign of 1919 used the U-boats to assist with raising $4.5 billion in bonds. Even after the Armistice and peace conference at Versailles, the U.S. government still needed to raise funds to pay war debts, underwrite the cost of U.S. troops occupying German territory, and fund the movement of men and materiel back home from Europe.
Using memoirs and contemporary articles from magazines and newspapers, Dubbs reconstructs many of the details relating to the U-boat visits around the country. Naval History readers will be interested to note that future World War II Navy leaders, including Thomas Hart, Charles Lockwood, and William Halsey, played important roles in this story.
Dubbs closes his study with accounts of the final demise of the six U-boats. Five were sunk as targets in 1921, for either naval gunners or Brigadier General Billy Mitchell’s Army Air Service bombers. U-111, ordered to the same fate, sank off Virginia on the way to the target area and was later raised, only to be resunk in deep water in 1922. Divers and enthusiasts have located the other five wrecks, where they rest as monuments to a generation both disgusted and mesmerized by unrestricted submarine warfare. Dubbs’ excellent narrative begs the question for today’s American public: What will capture its fascination with America’s recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—a set of war trophies or something else?
Coffins of the Brave: Lake Shipwrecks of the War of 1812
Kevin J. Crisman, Ed. Texas Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 415 pp. Append. Biblio. Glossary. Illus. Indexes. Maps. $54.
Reviewed by Charles E. Brodine Jr.
The Northern Lakes were the scene of a great shipbuilding contest during the War of 1812, as both the United States and Great Britain vied for naval mastery over those strategic inland waterways. From early on in the conflict, both sides recognized that command of the Lakes was the essential precursor to successful military operations along and across the U.S.-Canadian border. Consequently, both combatants directed extraordinary energies and resources toward building fleets powerful enough to dominate the eastern Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.
The restoration of peace between the belligerents in 1815 quickly idled the rival navies, and within two decades nearly all the “wooden veterans” of both fleets had been broken up, sold off, or had sunk at their moorings. The shipwrecked remains of 16 of these freshwater warships form the subject of Coffins of the Brave: Lake Shipwrecks of the War of 1812. The book’s editor, Kevin Crisman, is an associate professor of nautical archeology at Texas A&M University and leading authority on 1812-era Lakes shipwrecks, having researched and published on this topic for over three decades.
Coffins of the Brave is organized into three sections, each corresponding to a distinct theater of operations on the Northern Lakes—the Upper Lakes (Huron and Erie), Lake Ontario, and Lake Champlain. An introductory essay, penned by Crisman, opens each section by summarizing the strategies and major operations in each theater and providing context for the writings that follow. The essays on the shipwrecks cover the range of vessels that performed wartime service on the Lakes, from diminutive row galleys like the Allen on Lake Champlain to mighty ships of the line such as the St. Lawrence on Lake Ontario. It is noteworthy that some of these vessels, the schooner Nancy for example, were commercial craft converted to wartime service, while others, such as the brig Jefferson, were purpose-built ships designed to sail and fight as men-of-war.
The shipwreck studies presented in this volume, with the exception of that on the brig Niagara, are authored or coauthored by nautical archeologists “who personally carried out the field research and data analysis” on the profiled vessels. Each essay provides a narrative of the subject ship’s history from the period of her construction, through her service afloat, to her loss and rediscovery. This history is informed both by the documentary record and a detailed analysis of the ship’s extant remains, which provide important insights into period ship-construction methods, materials, and design. Though the non-specialist might find the analytical sections of these essays a challenging read because of their technical language, the inclusion of more than 200 illustrations, line drawings, and tables, as well as an extensive nautical-terms glossary help make this text more accessible to the general reader.
Some of the more intriguing findings of Coffins of the Brave relate to the construction and design of U.S. Lakes warships, in particular those built under the direction of Henry Eckford and Adam and Noah Brown. Given the remote, logistically isolated yards these men supervised, the speed with which they saw ships completed and launched down the ways still defies belief—the 20-gun brig Eagle, for example, was built in a mere 19 days. As analysis of the wrecks of the Eagle and brig Jefferson reveals, these feats of building legerdemain were accomplished in several ways: by being less selective in choice of woods used, relying more on rough finished work, and eliminating the use of certain reinforcing timbers in the ships’ hull. While these shortcuts accelerated the launch of ships, they also produced craft that were less structurally sound, less durable, and more vulnerable to damage from weather and battle.
In addition to developing methods to speed ship construction, Eckford and the Browns also designed ships that were fast, maneuverable, heavily armed, and capable of operating in shallows. Although these characteristics rendered American ships formidable combat opponents, they came at the cost of reduced stability, capacity, and weatherliness. These tradeoffs no doubt challenged a crew’s seamanship when high winds, heavy seas, or strong tides prevailed, or when maneuvering in chase, retreat, or battle with the enemy.
Coffins of the Brave makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the War of 1812 and to the early maritime history of the Great Lakes. Professor Crisman and his fellow contributors deserve high praise for demonstrating how the tools and analytical skills of the underwater archaeologist may be profitably employed to fill in gaps in the known historical record. Their work deserves a wide audience.
Sino-Japan Naval War 1894–1895
Piotr Olender. Sandomierz, Poland: Stratus, 2014. 228 pp. Illus. Maps. Tables. Line drawings. $45.
Reviewed by S. C. M. Paine
Piotr Olender specializes in lavishly illustrated coffee-table-volume-sized illustrated histories of Asian naval wars, with prior studies on the Sino-French Naval War (1884–85) and a two-volume set on the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). The latest book focuses on the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy eliminated Chinese naval power for the next century.
At the opening of hostilities, both countries had state-of-the-art navies that were roughly comparable, according to naval experts at the time. The book showcases numerous extremely rare photographs of the ships and artillery employed. It provides extensive tables detailing the characteristics, provenance, commanders, and crews of the ships. Maps detail each of the main battles, and an appendix contains beautiful line drawings of the many types of vessels.
As promised in the title, Olender focuses on the naval battles, with chapters on the Battle of Pungdo (Feng Island), the sinking of the Kowshing, the Battle of the Yalu, the Battle for Port Arthur (Lüshun), the Battle of Weiheiwei, the Battle for the Pescadores, and the Taiwan campaign, as well as separate chapters on each the Imperial Japanese Navy’s many essential troop landings that made military operations on land possible.
The volume focuses on the tactical and operational levels of war. Those interested in the capabilities of the ships and equipment employed, the trade-offs among battle formations, and the details of the naval battles and landings will be delighted. The Chinese and Japanese naval strategies described in this work had profound national, regional, and international implications. If Japan could not reach the theater by sea, it could not wage war. The war overturned the Asian balance of power, to the horror of China and exultation of Japan. Those interested in the strategic consequences of the war would do well to understand the naval operations that made the Japanese victory possible.
The book is based on a wide reading of Russian, Polish, English, and Czech secondary literature and consultation of British archives from the Admiralty and War Office. There is no examination of Chinese or Japanese sources—the languages of the war’s belligerents. Much of the English literature is actually based on English-language information that Japan provided at the time of its many victories and shortly after the war to cement its positive international reputation. The Chinese side of the war in many ways remains terra incognita because of Chinese reluctance to explore the reasons for their country’s failure to win a war that, given the size of the theater and asymmetry of resources between the two belligerents, Japan should never have been able to win.
The book provides a stunning visual contribution to the history of the war as well as an accessible naval history—the often forgotten dimension of warfare. The First Sino-Japanese War was one of the first wars in which both sides employed weapon systems of the Industrial Age and certainly the first such war in Asia.
This Jolly Little Gunboat: The USS Winona On the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River, 1861–1863
Patrick E. Purcell, Ed. Iowa City, IA: Press of the Camp Pope Bookshop, 2014. 190 pp. $13.95.
Reviewed by Robert Browning Jr.
After the conclusion of the Civil War, many officers wrote about their service in the conflict. The enlisted men did have venues such as the Confederate Veteran Magazine and, to a lesser extent, The Century Magazine to express their viewpoints and to relate their experiences. The voices of the enlisted men, however, remained much underrepresented in the literature. During the last 30 years, though, many more diaries and journals of Civil War soldiers and sailors have been brought to light by publication. The recollections representing the naval side of the war remain a much smaller number because fewer men served in the navies.
This journal, in the collection of the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia, had no known author. After careful research by the editor, Patrick Purcell, he determined that Montgomery P. Griffis kept the account. This is significant because not only was Griffis an enlisted man, but he was also part of the fire-room gang. The well-written journal entries show that he was educated, something relatively rare for one who toiled in the bowels of the ship as a coal heaver.
Griffis begins his journal in December 1861 with his transfer to the gunboat Winona only days after she went into commission. She was an Unadilla-class warship, often referred to as 90-day gunboats due to their quick construction. The Unadilla-class vessels were some of the most practical warships built for the war, serving on both blockade and riverine duty with distinction. The 23 ships in the class were 158 feet in length, with a 28-foot beam and a relatively shallow draft. Armed differently depending on their duty, the Winona was outfitted with an 11-inch smoothbore, two 24-pounders, and a single 20-pounder.
Griffis served in the warship through August 1863. The journal ends when the Winona begins her trip north for refitting and repairs. The author made some mid-war revisions, so this is a combination journal and reminiscence. Through regular entries for 20 months, the journal covers the vessel’s service, mainly on the Mississippi River. The gunboat supported Army operations, fought guerrillas, suffered through attacks from Confederate mobile batteries, and did a short stretch on blockade duty. The author also relates the Winona’s actions during the New Orleans campaign and an engagement with the Confederates to protect Fort Butler at Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Though most of the engagements he discusses were minor skirmishes, they proved often just as deadly as the larger ones.
As editor, Purcell has included sections that provide context and inform the reader about events occurring outside of the world that Griffis is observing, but that have an influence on the war and the movements of the Winona. His notes also identify people and events that the author mentions and corrects spelling and other errors. He includes a list of vessels mentioned in the text with some additional information on each. Purcell also reproduced nine poems included in the journal. One of the poems contains a line that became the title of the book.
Griffis’ journal adds color and fills gaps with information and details that are not in the official records. He notes the ship’s movements, each time they coaled ship, and the engagements with the enemy. He has definite opinions of some officers and occasionally relates to the interactions between the crew. His observations, for the most part, are no different than most of the other sailors who recorded their wartime experiences in letters and other sources. Griffis discusses monotony, some privations, and the sudden terror of enemy attacks. His daily existence as a coal heaver must have been grimmer than most of his shipmates’. Unfortunately, he does not relate these experiences, nor does he carp about his situation. The final product, however, is an essential document that anyone studying the war along the Mississippi River should consult.