27. The Use of Wartime Deceit to Fight Submarines
In World War I, the British Royal Navy had its hands full as it tried to beat back the German submarine menace. Submarine and anti-submarine warfare were still in its infancy, and technologies such as sonar that enable the detection of enemies underwater had not yet been invented. So the Royal Navy turned to deceit with special decoy vessels known as Q-ships. Those were heavily armed merchant ships that carried concealed weapons. Intended as bait to lure enemy submarines, the seemingly unarmed Q-ships would unveil their guns and sink the U-boats once they emerged to make a surface attack. It met with some success in the war’s first years, before Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 and began to sink merchant ships at sight and without warning.
The standard operating procedure at the time was for a U-boat to hail a civilian vessel, and allow its crew an opportunity to take to their lifeboats before it opened fire and sank it. U-boats could do that with a torpedo but preferred to use shells from the U-boat’s deck gun in order to save the significantly more expensive torpedoes for tougher targets. Q-ship decoys were usually trawlers or freighters with hidden guns in collapsible deck structures. They would sail routes known to be heavily infested with U-boats, in a bid to attract the attention of a German submarine and entice it to make an attack.
