The Forgotten Surrender: World War I and the German U-boat fleet
On 19 November 1918, eight days after World War I had ended, officers from the Royal Navy Submarine Service gathered on a depot ship in Harwich, on the coast of Essex. One of the officers, Commander Stephen King-Hall, told his diary of a “merry” atmosphere that evening, “for it is questionable if there had ever been so many submarine officers gathered together in one place.” That same night, train carriages filled with journalists, cameramen, and artists also descended on Harwich. Given the lack of space on the depot ships, one reporter had to sleep on a billiard table. “The cause of the gathering,” King-Hall wrote, “was enough to make the dumb sing.”¹
Early the next day, King-Hall and the rest of the assembled Royal Navy parties sailed their light cruisers and destroyers out into the North Sea. Expectant crowds lined the shores of Harwich to await their return — along with their new guests. As the morning fog cleared, there came into view a cluster of inbound vessels flying both the British and German naval ensigns. Twenty submarines from the Imperial German Navy were soon anchored in the River Stour. Many more would arrive in the coming months.
These submarines, called Unterseeboots or U-boats in their country of origin, had only weeks before been the pride of the German navy. Sneaking beneath the water’s surface, they targeted merchant ships headed for the Allied Powers in an attempt to cut their supply lines. These activities earned them a fearsome reputation in Allied propaganda. The British government described them as “ruthless pests” and “the greatest menace that ever faced our Empire.”² Yet here they were, sailing into captivity to form a sprawling metal corridor that came to be known as U-boat Avenue.
The surrender of the U-boats was one of the terms of the Armistice agreement that ended World War I on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918. The Germans, on whom the Armistice had placed full blame for the conflict, were to bring the U-boats to a designated spot between Britain and mainland Europe where they would be boarded by Royal Navy sailors and guided back towards British shores. After four years of war, emotions were high on both sides. Gordon S. Maxwell, a British naval officer involved in the surrender process, later recalled:
Twenty miles from the coast [we] met the U-Boats; all our men being at action stations, for they had learnt by long and bitter experience that the only German that can be trusted is a dead one … Without demonstration of any kind these sea-murderers, who had fouled the name of the second largest Navy in the world with a stain that nothing can wash out, went to their captivity … their prison was the River Stour.³
From November 1918 to April 1919, 168 U-boats found their way to Harwich via this process —now a largely forgotten event, but arguably one of the defining moments of the twentieth century. This article presents an original history of the surrender through the eyes of those who took part.
World War I marked the arrival of submarine warfare as a common tactic. Experimental submarines had been developed before, including the Turtle, an almost spherical vessel built in 1775 for use against the British during the American Revolutionary War. Its single occupant would navigate his way to the side of an enemy battleship, attach an explosive, and then retreat. The idea was not widely adopted at the time, but by 1914 there were 400 submarines in use by navies across the world. German inventors had played a pivotal role in the development of submarine technology, and during World War I U-boats became one of the deadliest weapons in the German armory.
Britain maintained a naval blockade on all German shipping throughout the war, contributing to widespread malnutrition, rationing, and numerous food riots in Germany. Submarine warfare was Germany’s means of retaliating. Franz Becker, a U-boat commander in the Mediterranean, remembered:
At the beginning of the war, it was not easy for us to sink merchant ships, we preferred to attack warships … But, when we got home to Germany [to] see how the country was blockaded, and how hungry our people were, it made us realize we needed to conduct war against merchant ships.⁴
The U-boat fleet, which numbered over 350 operational vessels at its peak, was accordingly used to sink Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. At times, the German government even sanctioned “unrestricted” submarine warfare, meaning U-boats were permitted to attack neutral shipping and to ignore humanitarian conventions protecting the merchant crews. These tactics proved brutally effective. U-boats sank 12.8 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping throughout the war.
Although the U-boat fleet was an indispensable component in Germany’s war effort, it also unwittingly contributed to its eventual defeat. When the U-20 submarine sank the civilian liner Lusitania in 1915, with many American passengers on board, it caused the diplomatic rift between Germany and the United States to widen. Further attacks on neutral ships in 1917 helped to bring the US into the war on the side of the Allies, and the addition of American resources tipped the balance decisively against Germany. The political leadership in Berlin eventually judged the war a lost cause, signing the Armistice agreement that came into force on 11 November 1918.
Subject to the the terms of the Armistice, the entire U-boat fleet was to be surrendered to the Allies. The first 20 began arriving at 10am on 20 November 1918. Personnel from the Royal Navy received the vessels at the specified coordinates 20 miles from British land. The U-boats were then boarded, at which point the Germans were asked to show their British counterparts how the controls worked and to confirm that “no infernal machines or booby traps of any sort are on board.”⁵ Guided in by Royal Navy warships, the U-boats then laid anchor in the River Stour. Their old crews were transported back to Germany.
Although the surrender was an extraordinary occasion, Admiral Tyrwhitt — commander of the Harwich Force and the man responsible for coordinating the surrender — was determined that it would be conducted without triumphant fanfare.⁶ A journalist from The Scotsman newspaper recorded his impressions from the shores of Harwich on that first day:
The fog cleared away in the forenoon and those who were fortunate enough to have the first view of the approaching fleet were much impressed … No sirens, whistles, or hooters were permitted … It was a silent entry into captivity.⁷
The first residents of U-boat Avenue had arrived — the last would come on 24 April 1919. At times, the line of anchored U-boats measured around two miles in length.
Throughout this process, despite Admiral Tyrwhitt’s insistence that there would be “no communication whatsoever” between the British and the Germans apart from official business, there were in practice numerous opportunities for personnel to exchange words. The British Admiralty was fully aware that this would be a “painful experience” for the U-boat crews, as indeed it proved to be. One German captain declared: “I hate you, and England … We have lost the war but I will fight again against you in the next war.” Others were less hostile. A British officer aboard one of the transport ships returning the crews to Germany reported that they were “silent and depressed” on the journey. In another conversation, two Germans even asked “to be allowed to remain in England, where they could get food and work.”⁸
The British believed the Germans and their ships to be “exceptionally dirty,” but were surprised that their former enemies did not conform to the vicious and conniving caricatures painted in wartime propaganda. Commander Stephen King-Hall, a member of one of the boarding parties during the surrender, wrote in his diary:
[T]he British parties were prepared for every eventuality save one. We were not prepared to find the Huns behaving for once as gentlemen … In nearly every case the German officer has seemed genuinely anxious to assist in every way possible.⁹
Most of the surrendered U-boats were researched or dismantled in Britain, but 66 of them were distributed out to France, Italy, Japan, and the United States, and many were paraded around to celebrate the end of the war.
The surrender, and the submarine war in general, had a far-reaching influence on future events. One important consequence was the normalization of submarines. Japanese engineers in particular took inspiration from their share of the surrendered German craft, using the knowledge they gained from dissecting them to boost their own submarine capabilities — which they later unleashed on the United States after Pearl Harbor. One way or another, submarines have continued to play a significant role in conflicts up to the present day.
In Britain, the U-boats forced the country to recognize that the Royal Navy’s mastery of the seas was not to be taken for granted, and that being an island nation did not guarantee safety. A documentary broadcast in 1964 noted that Britain, through its experience of World War I, “had lost something that no Continental nation had ever possessed: a centuries-old sense of immunity.”¹⁰
Meanwhile, the nature of Germany’s capitulation caused deep resentment among German soldiers and military leaders, who felt betrayed by the Armistice and the politicians who signed it. Many U-boat captains simply refused to partake in the surrender, leaving their junior officers to do it instead. One captain, Martin Niemöller, declared:
I have neither sought nor concluded this Armistice. As far as I am concerned, the people who promised our submarines to England can take them over. I will not do it.¹¹
Niemöller promptly quit the navy, and was initially attracted by the promise of the emergent National Socialist (Nazi) movement to restore Germany to its former glory. He later recognized the brutality and injustice of the Nazi “Third Reich” and became one of its most outspoken critics, but many others went on to participate in the revival of Germany’s military establishment in the 1930s.
The Armistice and the U-boat surrender became major symbolic catalysts for World War II in 1939–45, when Germany would again deploy a massive U-boat fleet. Karl Dönitz, a U-boat captain during World War I, was central to the reconstruction of German submarine capabilities under Adolf Hitler. He became Supreme Commander of the German Navy in 1943 and, as a committed Nazi, was named by Hitler as one of his successors following his suicide in April 1945. Dönitz’s brief presidency saw the Third Reich’s surrender to the Allied Powers and, with it, a permanent end to large-scale German U-boat activity.
Citations
- Stephen King-Hall, A North Sea Diary, 1914–1918, (reprinted by Forgotten Books, 2012), p. 230.
- As described in the captions of official British stereographic photographs— National Army Museum, NAM. 1972–08–67–2–189 and NAM. 1972–08–67–2–188.
- Gordon S. Maxwell, The Naval Front, (London, 1920), pp. 190–2.
- Quoted in Lowell Thomas, Raiders of the Deep, (Penzance, 2002).
- Admiralty arrangements for the surrender of the German submarines — The National Archives, ADM 137/2483.
- Admiral Tyrwhitt, diaries, 30 December 1917 to 19 April 1919 — The National Archives, ADM 137/343.
- The Scotsman newspaper, “Naval Surrender. Coming of the U-boats. First 20 at Harwich. Dejected German Officers,” 21 November 1918.
- Admiralty arrangements for the surrender, attached reports — The National Archives, ADM 137/2483.
- Stephen King-Hall, North Sea Diary, p. 232.
- BBC television, The Great War, broadcast 1964.
- Quoted in Theodore S. Hamerow and G. P. Gooch, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler, (Cambridge [MA], 1997), p. 41.
