Merchant Navy by Woodman Richard

Author:Woodman, Richard [Woodman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: The Merchant Navy
ISBN: 9780747813484
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A merchant vessel serving as a troop ship. The band plays for the Scots Guards as they board her at Southampton en route to the Western Front in France.

A German commerce-raider, a German warship disguised as a merchant vessel. This one, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, photographed in 1915, sank eight merchant ships.

First World War German U-boat built by Blohm & Voss, photographed in 1917.

The combined effect of the enemy’s war on trade was severe. Losses of tonnage rose alarmingly. The traditional counter-strategy to such a guerre de course was, of course, to shepherd and guard a number of merchant ships in orderly convoys. This had been a war-winning tactic during the eighteenth century but by 1914 it was considered outmoded. In 1872 the Admiralty had abandoned the Compulsory Convoy Act of 1794, ignoring the introduction of the submarine to the world’s navies thirty years later. Convoy was a tedious business and not one proper to an aggressive fighting navy. Nor, to their shame, did the generality of ship-owners insist upon it, as their forebears had done. The arguments against convoy in 1914 were complex but they sprang from all sectors and were largely based from the naval perspective on a lack of desire to undertake it, and from the mercantile viewpoint as inhibiting and damaging to self-interest.

Thus the globally spread ships of the mercantile marine were exposed not only to the enemy’s cruisers and commerce-raiders in distant waters, but his U-boats in the western approaches and, to make matters worse, minefields in the shallow waters of the home coast, above which the Zeppelin and aircraft were now an added danger. The consequence of all this was a mounting loss of ships, cargoes and seafarers. Many ship owners and their shareholders congratulated themselves on this, making fortunes from insurance paid on lost ships, marking a dark hour of our maritime history, but so it was. Meanwhile, the merchant seaman, shivering in his lifeboat endured an unpaid ordeal – because in many cases his pay stopped the moment his ship was sunk. His drowned shipmate often ot the better bargain.

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