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The role of the aircraft as a successful hunter and destroyer of submarines, a role dating from World War I, is well known. Less noted in naval history are the mainly unsuccessful attempts to employ submarines as carriers of aircraft. Between the World Wars, nearly every major navy experimented with the “submarine carrier,” testing the ingenuity of naval architects to accommodate ungainly seaplanes in the cramped confines of the undersea vessels.
Only the Japanese, however, built more than individual experimental aircraft-carrying submarines, and only they used the submarine-borne seaplane in actual war operations. But the Yokosuka E14Y1 “Glens” that ranged over the coastlines of Australia and North America were not the first submarine- carried aircraft to roam an enemy mainland in wartime. That distinction goes to a German Navy seaplane of early World War I.
In October 1914, the German armies advancing in Belgium occupied the port of Zee- brugge, famed for its giant mole—then as now the largest such breakwater in the world—and admirably located for operations against shipping in the English Channel. The Imperial Navy moved U-boats to this port the next month (although no formal submarine organization was to be established there until early 1915). The first of these to tie up at the wide quay, on 9 November, was the U-12, com-
Oberleutnant von Arnauld, in the rear cockpit, talked with his observer, Oberleutnant Moll, as his FF-29 sat athwartship on the U-12 at Zeebrugge on 6 January 1915.
manded by Kapitanleutnant Walter Forstmann. Four others followed.
The first contingent for what eventually was to become one of the Imperial Navy’s most active air stations arrived a month later, on 6 December, to base on the mole in a railroad shed converted to a hangar. This unit was commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Fried
rich von Arnauld de la Perriere* and consisted of three other officers, 55 enlisted men, and the grand total of two aircraft—Fried- richshafen FF-29S, two-place, twin-float biplanes powered by 120-h.p. engines which sped them at 59 m.p.h.
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The Zeebrugge submarines and aircraft were crude craft, even by the evolving standards of their time. The U-12 and her sisters, completed in 1911, displaced only 493 tons on the surface where they were propelled by Korting heavy-oil engines which belched location-revealing clouds of smoke. But these primitive little boats, faced with even more primitive antisubmarine measures, could pack a deadly sting. The U-12's sister, U-9, f°r example, had in September inflicted the first disaster of the war upon the Royal Navy by sinking the armored cruisers Cressy, Hogue, and
Aboukir with casualties of nearly 1,500.
The U-boats’ war mission could be summarized simply: Sink enemy shipping. The role of the Zeebrugge seaplanes was less easily defined in those early days of aviation. The Imperial Navy’s air arm had been created almost entirely during the few months since the start of the war, and almost in a vacuum. The very concept of naval aviation was new—-exactly what it should and could accomplish was Vet to be established. “Nothing was known at that time,” von Arnauld has recalled, “about the use of a sea-flight station near a land front line.”
No instructions having been given by navy headquarters, and no objectives given by the local command, von Arnauld, aware of some ‘raised eyebrows about my having settled down so far from the front line,” and his small Scluadron set to work developing their own missions and doctrine, stimulated by the offensive activity being carried out by the Submarines. “We had to prove that we were °f military value,” von Arnauld remembers.
Thus, by the end of December, von Ar- nauld’s unit, reinforced by two more seaplanes, had made 26 “war flights” against French and British objectives, adapting the unarmed hfriedrichshafens to carry 12-kg. bombs. On Christmas Day—the same day that saw the World’s first “carrier strike” when planes fr°m three British seaplane carriers tried to raid German Zeppelin sheds—a German seaplane carried the air war to English soil, flying up the Thames River to Erith on London’s outskirts, dropping two bombs harmlessly, and escaping a chase by three British aircraft. *
In these raids, the Zeebrugge fliers were hampered more by the frailties of their aircraft than by the enemy. Forced landings caused by fuel-line stoppages or fouled ignitions were common, and the seaplanes’ limited radius placed many targets in England out of range.
The frustrations of the airmen were known to the U-boat officers. Their shared base and the perils of operating relatively untried weapons of war created a bond between the officers of both arms, who, despite the novelty of these new weapons, were still, of course, loyal members of the same service.
The idea of co-operation therefore came naturally. A specific plan occurred to von Arnauld and Forstmann. It was quite simple: A submarine could increase a seaplane’s effective range by taking it to sea and placing it in take-off position by trimming down until
* At least one of these three Royal Naval Air Service planes carried a machine gun, and this may well have been the first time a machine-gun-armed aircraft ever rose to the defense of English skies. This plane, a Vickers FB-5, the famous “Gun Bus,” could have made mincemeat of the unarmed seaplane had it not suffered engine trouble and a gun jam, not to mention the fact that its gunner’s hands were frostbitten because he had forgotten his gloves.
the aircraft floated off. The relatively uncluttered deck of a U-boat lent itself to easy accommodation of a seaplane, and there was the added merit that no hoisting device was needed to lower or recover the plane.
The U-boat commander and the flier decided to conduct such an experimental operation. The U-12 took Friedrichshafen No. 204 aboard at 0940 on 6 January 1915—a clear day with a moderate south wind and good visibility, but with a ground swell outside the harbor. Before venturing outside the mole, Forstmann trimmed the U-12 down, and the plane with von Arnauld and his observer, Oberleutnant zur See Herman Moll, cast off for a successful trial run.
The FF-29 was placed athwartships, with its engine to port, an arrangement probably dictated by the difficulty of balancing the widely spaced floats of the plane on the submarine’s narrow superstructure walking deck had the aircraft been carried fore and aft. In this position, secured with simple rope lashings to the foredeck forward of the hatch, the Friedrichshafen seemed to dwarf the little U-12, its 53-foot 2-inch wingspan stretching nearly a third of the submarine’s 188-foot length.
The U-12 had no sooner left the breakwater’s shelter than it became apparent that the swell endangered the operation. Forstmann had been aware that a calm sea was a prerequisite, but in the absence of any experience with such a combination, he apparently had not realized how threatening even the normal swell could be to a fragile aircraft.
The FF-29 slipped and swayed alarmingly in its ropes, and after less than an hour, Forstmann began to fear that if it were not launched quickly it would be torn from the deck. He flooded the forward tanks at 1040 while the U-12 was about 30 kilometers to the southwest of Zeebrugge, in the general vicinity of Blankenberghe.
Despite the pitching of the vessel, von Arnauld took off without difficulty, and soon was heading for the southeast coast of England. A return rendezvous had been planned, sea and weather permitting, but von Arnauld immediately decided that to attempt it was “senseless.” After flying to the Kentish coast, where he was apparently unseen by land observers, he therefore returned directly to Zeebrugge. Forstmann cruised in the rendezvous
A newspaperman since the age of 14, Mr. Layman has worked on more than a dozen U. S. newspapers and news agencies including: Salt Lake Tribune (1948 to 1951); Associated Press, San Francisco Bureau (1951 to 1953); San Rajael Independent-Journal (1954 to 1961): since 1961 he has worked on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. This article is an outgrowth of the past four years of research work done by Mr. Layman in preparation for a history of shipboard aviation.
area for two hours before he, too, made for port, tying up at Zeebrugge at 1430.
While the experiment’s success had been limited by the hastened take-off, Forstmann and von Arnauld nevertheless considered it had been successful, requiring only a calmer sea and more secure stowage of the aircraft for future operations. The former observed in his logbook: “Only in good weather and without ground swell is it possible to considerably increase the active radius of an airplane by taking it on a U-boat... a strong locking ring with slip-rope device will be manufactured [which will make it] possible to securely slip the holding devices from inside [the aircraft].”
Von Arnauld was eager to repeat the operation, the next time carrying bombs in his plane. But there was to be no next time. The project received a negative response from the higher echelons to whom the experiment was reported. Von Arnauld was told by his superiors that after “thorough investigation” of his report: “U-boats operate in the water, airplanes in the air; there is no connection between the two.”
After such official discouragement, there was no further effort to develop the aircraft' carrying submarine at Zeebrugge. Forstmann did not remain there much longer; in March 1915, he was transferred to the Mediterranean, and subsequently he became the second- highest scoring submarine commander of both World Wars.*
* Ironically, Forstmann’s most famous boat, pe U-39, was placed out of action by aircraft, bei°^ forced into internment in Spain in 1918 because 0 bomb damage. Forstmann was no longer in command of her at that time.
Von Arnauld remained in command of the Zeebrugge seaplane station, which was greatly expanded during 1915, until December, when he was taken prisoner after his plane was downed by a French torpedo boat near Dunkirk.
The U-12 did not survive for long. On 10 March, shortly after Forstmann left her, she Was sunk by British destroyers off Fife Ness, losing her new commander and all but ten of her crew.
Forstmann and von Arnauld had devised their air-sea combination in response to a set of tactical conditions which soon ceased to have any bearing on the air war against England. The first Zeppelin raids had begun the same month as the U-12 experiment, and this offensive soon dwarfed the pin-prick aircraft attacks of late 1914. There was no need to populate the Channel with plane-carrying El-boats, hopelessly vulnerable until they had Unloaded their fragile cargoes, when just one of the giant airships could carry more high explosives than a fleet of seaplanes and had infinitely greater range. And when heavier- than-air attacks resumed in earnest in 1917, they were carried out by machines also of lastly greater range than the seaplanes of
1914-15.
But the idea of the submarine-carried aircraft was revived in the Imperial Navy later tn the war. Whereas Forstmann and von Arnauld had conceived of the submarine simply as a surface carrier of the aircraft, Which was to be the striking arm of the combination, in 1917 it was proposed to reverse
U-Boat with Wings 59
the roles and increase the submarine’s striking power by equipping some of the long-range “cruiser” U-boats with aircraft to scout out surface victims for them. Of necessity, such aircraft would have to be capable of being stowed in the submarine while it was submerged; consequently, designs were prepared for seaplanes which could be rapidly assembled and disassembled on board ship. At least two such aircraft were designed—the more successful being the Hansa-Brandenberg W-20 designed by Ernst Heinkel—but the idea was eventually abandoned without ever being tested.
Aside from a British experiment in 1916 similar to that carried out by the U-12* there was no other attempt during World War I to combine the aircraft with the submarine. And it was more than two decades later that the tactic devised by Forstmann and von Arnauld was carried to completion. When in September 1942, the Japanese submarine 1-25 launched her seaplane for incendiary raids on the Oregon forests in history’s only attack by aircraft on the continental United States,! the plan conceived on the Zeebrugge mole reached final if futile fruition.
* In April, 1916, two Sopwith seaplanes carried to sea by E-22 were successfully launched and flew to the RNAS base at Felixstowe. A proposal for equipping submarines with aircraft stowed in deck containers had been broached in October, 1915, but did not get beyond the discussion stage.
f See Nobuo Fujita and Joseph D. Flarrington “I Bombed the U.S.A.,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1961, pp. 64-69.
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A New Role for an LSMR
The USS Clarion River (ESMR-409) was requested to support a small U. S. Army unit some miles south of Danang which was reportedly receiving heavy sniper fire. After setting Condition 1 Rocket for the anticipated action, communications were finally established directly with the beleaguered unit. Target co-ordinates were received, a solution determined, gun orders fed to the launchers, and all hands stood by while the rest of the call for fire was requested from the obviously inexperienced Army man. When finally advised that friendly positions were located just 250 yards to the east and west of the target co-ordinates, we asked if he was certain he wanted us to eliminate the sniper position.
A moment of strained silence was followed by a shaken voice on the radio, “Heck, I don’t want you to shoot anything. Just fly over and take a look for us!”
------------------------------ Contributed by Lieutenant Commander G. R. Meinig, Jr., U. S. Navy
(The Naval Institute will pay $10.00 for each anecdote published in the Proceedings.)